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.
