Bøker av Fleur Jaeggy

"Reading time is approximately four hours. Remembering time, as for its author, the rest of one's life," said Joseph Brodsky of Fleur Jaeggy's novel, Sweet Days of Displine. Now Jaeggy has come up with seven stories, each at some deep level in dark complicity with the others, all as terse and spare as if etched with a steel tip. A brooding atmosphere of horror, a disturbing and subversive propensity for delirium haunts the violent gestures and chilly irony of these tales. Full of menace, the air they breathe is stirred only by the FÜhn, the warm west wind of the Alps that inclines otherwise respectable citizens to vent the spleen and angst of life's last vanities.

Compressed, delicate and brutally precise, Proleterka is a fierce coming-of-age story.

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, and as the narrator broods over her schemes to win the affections of the perfect new girl, the novel gathers an unsettling energy.

A wife is suspended in a bird cage; a thirteenth-century visionary senses the foreskin of Christ on her tongue: Fleur Jaeggy's gothic imagination knows no limits. In this, her long-awaited return, we read of an 'eerie maleficent calm, a brutal calm', and recognise the timbre of a writer for whom a paradoxical world seethes with quiet violence.