Biography
Fleur Jaeggy is a true original of European writing and has been translated into over twenty languages. The Times Literary Supplement named Proleterka as a Best Book of the Year upon its US publication, and her Sweet Days of Discipline won the Premio Bagutta and the Premio Speciale Rapallo.
More Info
- Find out more about I Am the Brother of XX, Sweet Days of Discipline and Proleterka.
- Read a review of Proleterka here.
Reviews
Martin Riker
New York Times Book Review
‘Stark, surprising prose. It’s hard to capture in a line or two the strange precision of Jaeggy’s prose. Darkness seems never far away.’
Sheila Heti
The New Yorker
‘It is hard not to be impressed by Jaeggy’s own spiritual and aesthetic grandeur, which casts her stories in such a compellingly cool light. She, too, has a startling ability to go beyond: beyond the sentimental heart, the writerly niceties, the conventions that bind us, and the messy effusions of contemporary life. She once said, in an interview, “One should be in one’s own void. Void is silence. Solitude. An absence of relationships. . . . The void is a plant that must continually be watered.” It is our good fortune that she sits at her swamp-green typewriter, watering it.’
Emily Labarge
Los Angeles Review of Books
‘Jaeggy’s astute compression of narrative detail is at once serene and startling. Beneath a placid, opalescent surface lurks a threat of violence that may or may not be realised, but which contributes to the profound impression that people and their lives are unpredictable, coursing with icy, barren wildness.’
The Rumpus
‘Jaeggy seems to have crushed a glass in her palm and tweezed out a few shards for the page. Her prose is indeed extraordinary – it is also frightening.’
Daniel Johnson
The Paris Review
‘Reading Jaeggy is not unlike diving naked and headlong into a bramble of black rose bushes, so intrigued you are by their beauty: it’s a swift, prickly undertaking, and you emerge the other end bloodied all over.’
Publishers Weekly
‘It is thrilling to live in Jaeggy’s worlds, which are so intense they threaten to boil over.’
Kirkus
‘A beautiful but inscrutable book about disconnection and the passage of time.’
Publishers Weekly
‘In this strange and shimmering nonlinear text from Swiss writer Jaeggy, the lonely children of the wealthy and their eccentric employees negotiate the boundary between companionship and solitude...In short, enjoyably expressionistic sections, Jaeggy sketches the emotional lives of people marooned but not content to remain entirely alone. What emerges is a fascinating and memorable portrait of a milieu obsessed with the passing of time.’
Barbara Epler
TANK Magazine
‘Proleterka is a ferocious study - a masterclass in distance , diffidence, death, and ‘insomniac resentment.’
Claire-Louise Bennett
'Thank the gods and tip the devil for Fleur Jaeggy!'
Claire-Louise Bennett
'Thank the gods and tip the devil for Fleur Jaeggy!'
Emily Rhodes
The Spectator
'The fierceness of her words erupts from the seams of her tiny sentences ... Jaeggy’s highly unusual work is finally gaining recognition in the English-speaking world.'
Sheila Heti
New Yorker
‘Her sentences are hard and compact, more gem than flesh. Images appear as flashes, discontinuous, arresting, then gone.’
Emily Labarge
Frieze
‘Jaeggy’s Proleterka is a strange and compressed space in which time eddies, tenses tilt and perspectives wheel: an enclosed universe with a logic of its own.’
Kirkus Reviews
‘Proleterka is an elegantly structured and stubbornly moving study of innocence destroyed and love denied.’
Tim Parks
‘Jaeggy is absolutely sui generis. She obeys no conventions. Every sentence in Proleterka is a surprise, every turn of thought unsettling.’
Susan Salter Reynolds
Los Angeles Times
‘When translator Alastair McEwen writes "the sound would come coiling out," he knows it has to have the same snap, crackle and pop now as five, 10, 100 years from now. And he makes sure it does.’
Margaret Drabble
New Statesman
'Jaeggy’s works are a translator’s dream: short, lucid and complex. Her distinctive vocabulary and syntax move elegantly and it would seem effortlessly into the English language. . . The story is deceptively simple. . . The atmosphere of an all-female community of adolescent girls is powerfully conveyed.'
Sheila Heti
The New Yorker
‘It is hard not to be impressed by Jaeggy’s own spiritual and aesthetic grandeur, which casts her stories in such a compellingly cool light. She, too, has a startling ability to go beyond: beyond the sentimental heart, the writerly niceties, the conventions that bind us, and the messy effusions of contemporary life.’
Daniel Johnson
The Paris Review
‘This book is twisted and hypnotizing and, somehow, downright lovely. Reading it is not unlike diving naked and headlong into a bramble of black rosebushes, so intrigued you are by their beauty: it’s a swift, prickly undertaking, and you emerge the other end bloodied all over.’
Publishers Weekly, starred review
‘The stories in Jaeggy’s collection are masterpieces of fury and restraint . . . These chilling, beguiling stories dig up reflections on solitude, regret, and sometimes even on love. It is thrilling to live in Jaeggy’s worlds, which are so intense they threaten to boil over, yet pull back just enough to keep their secrets.’
Kirkus Reviews
‘Jewels of intellect and compassion . . . In prismatic translation from the Italian, these tiny tales sparkle with wit and worldly wisdom.’
Cathleen Schine
New York Review of Books
'Startling and original―so disturbing and so haunting.'
New Yorker
‘Small-scale, intense, and impeccably focused.’
Susan Salter Reynolds
LA Times
‘Nothing rivals its intensity.’
April Bernard
Newsday
‘How a novel could be so chilly and so passionate at the same time is a puzzle, but that icy-hot quality is only one of the distinctions of Sweet Days of Discipline.’
Amanda DeMarco
Financial Times
‘Jaeggy is a master of the short form . . . her stories without fail are complex and devastating. [Her] prose is superb (and as superbly translated) as ever, her characteristic desolation as self-possessed as it is recherché.’
Claire Hazelton
‘‘An intensely beautiful and original collection that bristles with a strange and often disturbing magic. [...] Jaeggy is a master of the short form.’
Jane Graham
The Big Issue
‘Jaeggy is something of an offbeat legend in European literature, and, due to her unique, askance and often disarming view of the world, a favourite of The Big Issue’s . . . Jaeggy’s genius [is to] provide an innocuous orchard setting, then hand us a magnifying glass to see the cockroaches creeping in the undergrowth. And we are transfixed.’
Publishers Weekly, starred review
‘It is thrilling to live in Jaeggy’s worlds, which are so intense they threaten to boil over, yet pull back just enough to keep their secrets.’
Los Angeles Review of Books
‘Jaeggy's astute compression of narrative detail is at once serene and startling. Beneath a placid, opalescent surface lurks a threat or violence that may or may not be realized, but which contributes to the profound impression that people and their lives are unpredictable, coursing with icy, barren wildness.’
Ingeborg Bachmann
‘She has the enviable first glance for people and things, she harbors a mixture of distracted levity and authoritative wisdom.’
Susan Sontag
‘A wonderful, brilliant, savage writer.’
Joseph Brodsky
‘Fleur Jaeggy’s pen is an engraver’s needle depicting roots, twigs, and branches of the tree of madness―extraordinary.’