COLLEEN KELSEY
Fleur Jaeggy said that writing her fourth novel, Sweet Days of Discipline, was an “exercise in self-punishment,” something any writer may relate to. Published in its original Italian the year I was born, 1989, I read this short 101-page book one airless summer afternoon shortly after I turned 33, my Jesus year. Jaeggy’s postwar story of a teenage boarder at an all-girls school high in the Swiss Alps—not far from where Robert Alser was found dead of a heart attack in the snow—creeps forward with a. glacial edge that remains dangerous, threatening, no matter how many times I reread it. The narrator is set on “conquering” a new student, one already leagues ahead of her in beauty, asceticism, and volatility. For all the baroque girlishness and ripe minds and bodies held in stasis in this pseudo-sanatorium, the writing is lethal. Glassy, so elegant, militantly controlled. Converted by its style as much as its strangeness, I return often to its depiction of the violence of loneliness. We’re lucky Jaeggy is a pyromaniac.
