Fleur Jaeggy
Sweet Days of Discipline
Set in postwar Switzerland, Fleur Jaeggy’s eerily beautiful novel begins simply and innocently enough: ‘At fourteen I was a boarder in a school in the Appenzell’. But there is nothing truly simple or innocent here. With the off-handed knowingness of a remorseless young Eve, the narrator describes life as a captive of the school and her designs to win the affections of the apparently perfect new girl, Frederique. As she broods over her schemes as well as on the nature of control and madness, the novel gathers a suspended, unsettling energy.
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- Sweet Days of Discipline was Fleur Jaeggy’s first novel to be translated into English, and was originally published in the UK by William Heinemann in 1991.
- Upon its Italian publication, it won the highly-regarded prizes, the Premio Bagutta and the Premio Speciale Rapallo.
- Find out more about Fleur Jaeggy and her short story collection I Am the Brother of XX.
- Read an interview with Fleur Jaeggy in Tank Magazine.
Print status: Available
Author: Fleur Jaeggy
Translator: Tim Parks
Original language: Italian
Format: B-format paperback
Publication date: 8 February 2018
ISBN: 9781911508182
Ebook ISBN: 9781911508199
Number of pages: 106
Reviews
Claire-Louise Bennett
'Thank the gods and tip the devil for Fleur Jaeggy!'
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.'
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.’
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.’
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.’
