Detachment in Fiction from Fleur Jaeggy and Jean Genet

 

Detachment in Fiction from Fleur Jaeggy and Jean Genet

By Sue Rainsford

Fleur Jaeggy’s fiction works, two short novels and two short story collections, are marked with a quiet violence and a very particular brand of detachment. Importantly, though her characters operate through various calibres of neurosis, they do not experience their melancholy or habitual pain as opposites to a preferred, more buoyant state. The world they occupy, then, unfolds at a slight removal from our own: it is a place where alienation, dysfunction, and disappointment are unquestioned, non-negotiable terms.

Marcel Schwob / Imaginary Lives / Review

Marcel Schwob

IMAGINARY LIVES

by Marcel Schwob

“Won’t the dead come to talk for just half an hour with this sick man?” – Marcel Schwob’s Imaginary Lives Remixed

Chris Clarke’s recent translation of Marcel Schwob’s Imaginary Lives (Vies Imaginaires, 1896), the first English version in more than a quarter century, brings this remarkable book to a new generation of Anglophone readers. Though the influence of Schwob’s work extends widely, from Max Jacob to Rainer Maria Rilke to William Faulkner, Imaginary Lives in particular took hold in South America, where Jorge Luis Borges used it as a model for his A Universal History of Infamy, which in turn inspired J. Rudolfo Wilcock’s comic masterpiece The Temple of Iconoclasts and Roberto Bolaño’s Nazi Literature in the Americas. 

The Perfect Choice by Fleur Jaeggy

 

The Perfect Choice  

by Fleur Jaeggy

Translated by Gini Alhadeff

Fleur Jaeggy / La elección perfecta

The pain her son had caused her by choosing to die on a day in spring was less than she had expected. He is happy now, she said. And she herself felt almost relieved. She would have liked to die that way. Or she might have chosen a different method. But which? Pain let itself be pushed about like a paper kite and she, the mother, after having pondered the various ways of dying, was in absolute agreement with her only son, on the perfect choice. It couldn’t have been otherwise. She shut her eyes in order to see the scene, she knew the place by heart. Meanwhile she thought that she would have to change her will. The son had let himself fall off a rock, on the glorious Via Mala, where as a child they had taken him to see the gorges. Jörg looked unhappily at the water down below, lizard green, deep down. The mother dragged him way up, so as to have him look below. To force him to look down. His step faltered. He was sickly, wan. And this did not please the mother who held him by the hand. The boy looked at the emerald ring, the same colour as the water. Beyond the limits of the visible. And today, years later, he went down. No one forced him. Of his own will. His will pushed him to the end. Almost as though to recover his eyes as they’d been back then, that had settled with hatred on the pools of water. He hardly realised that he was going down, falling, the green water rocking him and the sharp edges of the rocks had already torn him apart. Fossil lances. He left the bicycle padlocked. Out of habit. He had been advised to ride a bike to attempt to calm his insomnia. You must tire yourself out. You must tire yourself out a great deal. With some physical exercise. The insomnia lessened. At the same time tiredness increased. The doctor is pleased. And the mother who had got him used to sleeping pills, too. They were a dynasty of insomniacs. Of insomniac women. The men were more given to sleep. They had always slept, the mother said on a sour note. Why then could her son not sleep? The tiredness had to be increased so that the insomnia could decrease. The only son had become so tired that he no longer cared about the insomnia. He didn’t even notice. He stayed up all night, it seemed to him that he had a great deal to do, in the doing of nothing.

The Heir by Fleur Jaeggy

The Heir

by Fleur Jaeggy

Translated from Italian by Gini Alhadeff

 

Fleur Jaeggy / La heredera

Hannelore, a girl without a fixed residence, is the only witness to a fire in the apartment of Fraulein von Oelix. A modest, gray afternoon. Vitreous. The fraulein is a kind woman, wilted and very lonely. And solitude had made her even kinder, she practically apologized. Lonely people are often afraid to let their solitude show. Some are ashamed. Families are so strong. They have all of advertising on their side. But a person alone is nothing but a shipwreck. First they cast it adrift, then they let it sink. Fraulein von Oelix lives in a lovely apartment. The fraulein eats little, is strictly vegetarian. Hannelore has just returned from shopping. She is ten years old. She follows the fraulein’s orders with precision and good cheer. She is happy to be of service. She is attached to her. That afternoon, the air was becoming stifling. “I am about to faint,” said Fraulein von Oelix. It was a lucky thing that the girl was there. So calm, tranquil, not gripped by panic. She would call the firefighters. Flames are swift. Around the fraulein the flames were spinning, as though playing. Hannelore put a wool turban on her head. Her hands are covered in rags, as though they were boxing gloves. She is playing, too. She ducked the flames nimbly, she was using a wool blanket as a shield. The adorable little warrior. The apartment is semi-destroyed. The girl did not call the firefighters. The portraits fall. The fire, Hannelore thinks, shows its vocation to annihilate. The word vocation, she said to the flames in a knowing tone, regards you, fire, because everything has a primordial force that triggers our actions. Fire is not the criminal. It is God who sends the flames into the apartment with its Biedermeier furniture. There are images with a heart in the shape of a flame. It was He who started the fire. Souls are dangerous. Often enflamed. The girl felt like preaching, but breathing was labored. The flames excited her. She runs from room to room, drunk with danger. Who is she to impede a destructive destiny? Only God can. God ordered the total destruction of the house. She knows that. There is something larger above us all, in hidden places that command the flames to take possession of every life pulse. She is indigent, the daughter of unknown parents, without prospects. She cannot beseech. She has nothing. How can she pray for grace? Those who have nothing, nothing at all, don’t ask. She doesn’t even have a past. Or a birthday. She sprang from trash and to trash will return. She sprang from the swamps of the dead. And to the swamps she will return. That is why the fraulein took her in. Why then put out flames willed by supreme design? And then she was having fun. For the first time, in her miserable existence. For us, creatures of the streets, instinct is our dwelling. And a total disregard for the good. And often, when it feels like it, evil is the best form that the highest good can take.

An Encounter in the Bronx by Fleur Jaeggy

 

An Encounter in the Bronx 

by Fleur Jaeggy

  

Translated from the Italian by Gini Alhadeff.

Fleur Jaeggy / Un encuentro en el Bronx

I

n a restaurant with Oliver, not far from his house. First a visit to his freezing house. He loathes the heat. Or perhaps, for mental or clinical reasons I cannot know, the heat simply stifles him. It made an impression on me, the degree to which he detests the heat. Maybe because although I like the Nordic sky, ice, snow, I am sensitive to the cold. I cover up in the daytime, I cover up before going to bed, I type wearing gloves with cutoff fingers. Oliver came here one winter. He opened the windows. He went out on the terrace. I stayed in the house wearing a coat, scarf, gloves. My hands get cold. My neck. I am cold in a way I’m tempted to call internal, a terrible word, but never mind. An internal cold. Whereas Oliver is always hot. I don’t think it’s merely a physical matter. Although he weighs more than I do. Until a few months ago I weighed less than ninety pounds. But I have known thin people who hated the heat. So it’s not just a question of how a body is constructed. Nor a question of blood. Nor do I think it’s a question of feelings. Mine can be quite cold, even when I ardently wish for heat. But not too much. Naturally it depends on what type of heat it is. One summer, in Thessaloniki, Greece, there were headlines in the papers, people were dying from the heat. I realized something was odd, and I was hot, too. But I wasn’t worn out. It was the day we went looking for Philip’s tomb. It was shut. But they let us in. When it’s that hot outside, I cover myself up. Another summer in Greece, in the Peloponnese, a nun mistook me for a nun. I was wearing something long, white, and a cut of linen on my head that fell down my back.

I Am the Brother of XX by Fleur Jaeggy review – otherworldly short stories

Dark stories of madness, loss and murder from a Swiss-Italian master of the short form

It’s a quarter-century since Fleur Jaeggy’s novel Sweet Days of Discipline, of which Joseph Brodsky said, “Reading time … four hours. Remembering time ... the rest of one’s life.” Swiss-Italian Jaeggy, a master of the short form, again creates something unforgettable with these otherworldly stories, translated by Gini Alhadeff. They frame haunting, dreamlike moments: a 13th-century woman senses the taste of “Christ’s foreskin … tender as egg skin and very sweet”; an orphan burns alive the aristocrat who took her in “for the blasted glory of it”; a family is cursed by a possessed mandrake root. Told in Jaeggy’s characteristically jagged prose, these dark stories of madness, loss and murder are urgent and evocative. Central to each are surreal images reminiscent of paintings by Leonora Carrington or Max Ernst: “her hands, like the claws of a crustacean, clutched at a little mound of dust”. This is an intensely beautiful and original collection that bristles with a strange and often disturbing magic.

THE GUARDIAN

DE OTROS MUNDOS

8 escritoras comparten su lista definitiva de lecturas para la cuarentena
La dulce crueldad de Fleur Jaeggy
Fleur Jaeggy / Suiza, infame y genial
Fleur Jaeggy / La agonía de los insectos
Fleur Jaeggy / Pétalos enfermos
El perturbador y depurado bisturí de Fleur Jaeggy / A propósito de 'El último de la estirpe'
Fleur Jaeggy / La flor del mal
Fleur Jaeggy / Sublime extrañeza
Fleur Jaeggy / Los hermosos años del castigo / Reseña de Enrique Vila-Matas
Claustrofóbica Fleur Jaeggy
Fleur Jaeggy / Las cosas desaparecen / Entrevista

CUENTOS
Fleur Jaeggy / Negde
Fleur Jaeggy / El último de la estirpe
Fleur Jaeggy / Agnes
Fleur Jaeggy / El velo de encaje negro
Fleur Jaeggy / Un encuentro en el Bronx
Fleur Jaeggy / La heredera
Fleur Jaeggy / La elección perfecta
Fleur Jaeggy / La sala aséptica
Fleur Jaeggy / Retrato de una desconocida
Fleur Jaeggy / Gato
Fleur Jaeggy / Ósmosis
Fleur Jaeggy / La pajarera

DANTE
Il doloroso incanto di Fleur Jaeggy
Fleur Jaeggy e Franco Battiato / Romanzi e canzoni «per anni beati»

DRAGON
The Austere Fiction of Fleur Jaeggy
Fleur Jaeggy’s Mourning Exercise
The Single Most Pristine Certainty / Fleur Jaeggy, Thomas Bernhard, and the Fact of Death
Close to Nothing / The autofictional parodies of Fleur Jaeggy
The Monumental Lonerism of Fleur Jaeggy
Sacred Inertia / Review of I Am the Brother of XX & These Possible Lives by Fleur Jaeggy
I Am the Brother of XX by Fleur Jaeggy review – otherworldly short stories

SHORT STORIES
The Black Lace Veil by Fleur Jaeggy
An Encounter in the Bronx by Fleur Jaeggy
The Heir by Fleur Jaeggy
The Perfect Choice by Fleur Jaeggy

The Black Lace Veil by Fleur Jaeggy

 

Fleur Jaeggy

The Black Lace Veil 

Short Story by Fleur Jaeggy

Translated from the Italian by Gini Alhadeff

“The Black Lace Veil” is one of the stories from Fleur Jaeggy’s collection, I Am the Brother of XX. It was translated from the Italian by Gini Alhadeff.

Fleur Jaeggy / El velo de encaje negro

.

My mother had an audience with the Pope. I found this out from a photograph of the Holy Father with her looking at him, wearing a black veil. From that photograph I understood, perceived, in fact clearly saw, that my mother was depressed. Depressed in a definitive way. The smile is sad, the glance, which is trying to be kind, is without hope. Mother was a rather sociable person, elegant, lovely jewelry, a lot of charm, Givenchy, Patou, Lanvin — ​in fact many aesthetic qualities which are not dissimilar to internal ones. In the photograph I noticed for the first time that Mother was all in all a desperate woman — ​or almost desperate. In spite of her little bridge tables. She entertained a great deal, now some of the bridge tables have been left to me and sometimes I hear the calls: sans atout, passe, hearts. Then I ask myself why she went to see the Pope. I am her daughter and would never have thought of going. What made her seek the blessing of the Holy Father? Maybe her despair: she wanted to be blessed. Wearing the dark lace veil, partly obscuring her face that was so sad. There is something frightful in realizing from a photograph that one’s own mother was depressed. Definitively depressed. Or perhaps she only was at that moment. The presence of the Holy Father threw her into such a state of bewilderment that it made her expression unhappy. With no way out. As she desperately tried to smile and the eyes were already in darkness. They are — ​one could say right away — ​extinguished, dead, closed. Yet she was still beautiful. Beauty could not conceal the despair, as the grim veil she wore on her head could not hide her beauty.

Sacred Inertia / Review of I Am the Brother of XX & These Possible Lives by Fleur Jaeggy

Fleur Jaeggy

Sacred Inertia | Review of I Am the Brother of XX & These Possible Lives by Fleur Jaeggy — Joseph Schreiber

Her new short story collection, I Am the Brother of XX, serves to showcase her exceptional ability to create an atmosphere of brittle, gothic claustrophobia with a contained, simmering intimation of violence that, on occasion, rises to the surface. And the three brief biographical essays that comprise These Possible Lives are a delight. — Joseph Schreiber

I Am the Brother of XX
Fleur Jaeggy
Translated by Gini Alhadeff
New Directions
128 pages; $14.95

These Possible Lives
Fleur Jaggy
Translated by Minna Zallman Proctor
New Directions
64 pages; $12.95

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One might argue that Fleur Jaeggy does not write so much as channel language, allowing her words to form imaginary spaces that exist on an altered plane of experience. To read her is to inhabit, for a moment, that space—one that exists in the shadows, one that contains, to borrow an expression from one of her earlier stories, a certain “sacred inertia.” [1] You can almost feel it. There is an unmistakable current of brisk, melancholic foreboding that courses beneath the surface of her prose. The chill can make you shudder, the stark beauty of her terse sentences catch your breath. Atmospheric. Disconcerting. And strangely alluring. It is a rare author who manages to sustain an emotionally intense voice that is at once distinct, abstracted, and tightly restrained. However, anyone who has fallen under the spell of Jaeggy’s fiction will know its undefinable appeal.

The Monumental Lonerism of Fleur Jaeggy

 

The Monumental Lonerism of Fleur Jaeggy

BY NORA SHAALAN

21 FEBRUARY, 2022

The Water Statues
by Fleur Jaeggy
tr. by Gini Alhadeff
New Directions, pp 96, 2021

The suggestion that there is something dignifying about solitude appears to consume the imagination of Swiss novelist Fleur Jaeggy, whose short novels have recently been translated into English. Though she was friends with literary figures like Ingeborg Bachmann, Joseph Brodsky, and Italo Calvino, who sometimes appear as characters in her stories, Jaeggy's translator describes her as a 'monumental loner', reclusive and frustratingly reticent. It should come as no surprise, then, that the latest of her works to appear in translation, The Water Statues (trans. Gini Alhadeff), takes a platitude—solitude as enriching, loneliness as debilitating—and reanimates it in order to consider what solitude gives and takes from us.

Close to Nothing / The autofictional parodies of Fleur Jaeggy

 

Fleur Jaeggy

Close to Nothing

The autofictional parodies of Fleur Jaeggy

by Aaron Robertson

December 15, 2017

Fleur Jaeggy is an insomniac. She nods off at dawn after lying immobile on a bed. She has thought of nothing the night before. How, she asks, is it possible I have anything at all to say? Jaeggy demures, coyly telling one interviewer that the words come from her typewriter. Before writing, Jaeggy enters her own vuoto, the Italian for “empty space,” “vacuum,” “nothingness,” “hole.” The vuoto, she says, is a species of solitudine: the solitude of a wilderness and the absence of relations.

 

Fleur Jaeggy

The Single Most Pristine Certainty: Fleur Jaeggy, Thomas Bernhard, and the Fact of Death

October 3, 2019   •   By Sophie Madeline Dess

WE ARE TOLD that novels are meant to teach us something. It’s as if the objective goals in life can be projected outward in the imagination, and novels are there to help us discern our trajectory through this projection. Each character’s choice marks the carving of a particular path, by which we might judge our own. There are some out there (Malcolm Cowley, among others) who believe that even an author’s choice to use a “hard” word as opposed to an “easy” word is an inherently moral decision — one that, we can assume — impacts the reader’s engagement with the text on moral terms (whatever those might be). It is tired news now to note that even when novels are not explicitly instructional, they can still be read as guides, with subtle ethical or behavioral insinuations. One can walk away from Madame Bovary — a novel in which moral and aesthetic tropes are continuously undermined — still having “learned” something: do not — you impressionable fool! — be brainwashed by popular, romantic novels, lest you run the risk of becoming the vulnerable, reckless, impulsive, naïve eponymous Emma.

 

Fleur Jaeggy

Fleur Jaeggy’s Mourning Exercise

On the rain-soaked tribute of The Water Statues

The Water Statues by Fleur Jaeggy, trans. Gini Alhadeff. New Directions, 96 pages.

Bailey Trela
September 30, 2021

IN THE SUMMER OF 1971, the Swiss writer Fleur Jaeggy spent a month in Poveromo, a small village outside the town of Massa in Tuscany, with her friend, the Austrian novelist and poet Ingeborg Bachmann.

The Austere Fiction of Fleur Jaeggy

Fleur Jaeggy

The Austere Fiction of Fleur Jaeggy

Her work sees little point in exploring happiness, productivity, or self-understanding. Her focus is the void.

Sheila Heti
September 18, 2017

Unlike many writers, Jaeggy mounts an aesthetic resistance to the soul laid bare.Courtesy New Directions Publishing

Few writers push the reader away with the coolness, dignity, and faint melancholy of Fleur Jaeggy. In her new story collection, “I Am the Brother of XX” (New Directions), she praises her friend Ingeborg Bachmann, one of the most celebrated Austrian writers of the twentieth century, for needing “little encouragement not to speak.” Similarly commendable is a suicidal man, in one of her novels, who lives near a church, and who makes sure that “the striking of the hour coincided with the revolver shot. That way no one heard.” Elsewhere, we meet nymphs who have stepped down from their paintings into a darkened museum; they wish to try out life. But, “having descended to earth, they realized they were ill-disposed to living. . . . They abhor all manner of effusion.” How embarrassing to read Jaeggy’s stories, and to see one’s own life through her eyes. Yes, it’s “all manner of effusion.”