Fleur Jaeggy

Fleur Jaeggy is often noted for her terse and telegraphic style, which somehow brews up a profound paradox that seems bent on haunting the reader: despite a sort of zero-at-the-bone baseline, her fiction is weirdly also incredibly moving. How does she do it? No one knows. But here, in her newest collection, I Am the Brother of XX, she does it again. Like a magician or a master criminal, who can say how she gets away with it, but whether the stories involve famous writers (Calvino, Ingeborg Bachmann, Joseph Brodsky) or baronesses or 13th-century visionaries or tormented siblings bred up in elite Swiss boarding schools, they somehow steal your heart. And they don't rest at that, but endlessly disturb your mind.

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. Whether telling of mystics, tormented families or famously private writers, Jaeggy's terse, telegraphic writing is always psychologically clear-eyed and deeply moving, always one step ahead, or to the side, of her readers' expectations. 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.

New Directions is proud to present Fleur Jaeggy’s strange and mesmerizing essays about the writers Thomas De Quincey, John Keats, and Marcel Schwob. A renowned stylist of hyper-brevity in fiction, Fleur Jaeggy proves herself an even more concise master of the essay form, albeit in a most peculiar and lapidary poetic vein. Of De Quincey’s early nineteenth-century world we hear of the habits of writers: Charles Lamb “spoke of ‘Lilliputian rabbits’ when eating frog fricassse”; Henry Fuseli “ate a diet of raw meat in order to obtain splendid dreams”; “Hazlitt was perceptive about musculature and boxers”; and “Wordsworth used a buttery knife to cut the pages of a first-edition Burke.” In a book of “blue devils” and night visions, the Keats essay opens: “In 1803, the guillotine was a common child’s toy.” And poor Schwob’s end comes as he feels “like a ‘dog cut open alive’”: “His face colored slightly, turning into a mask of gold. His eyes stayed open imperiously. No one could shut his eyelids. The room smoked of grief.” Fleur Jaeggy’s essays—or are they prose poems?—smoke of necessity: the pages are on fire.

Det litterære landskapet som tar form gjennom de 20 novel.lene i denne samlingen, bærer et umiskjennelig preg av forfatterens stilferdige, vakre, og samtidig dystre skrivekunst som vi kjenner fra hennes tidligere bøker. Den korthugde og finslipte språkføringen er på ingen måte voldsom, men er alltid preget av et underliggende mørke. Ensomhet, sorg og dødslengsel er temaer som går igjen: Fleur Jaeggy utforsker her menneskesinnets mørkeste sider, til tider så mørkt at det nesten ikke er til å holde ut. Fleur Jaeggy (f. 1940 i Zurich) er en sveitsisk forfatter med italiensk som morsmål. I en alder av tjue flyttet hun til Roma - hvor hun ble kjent med noen av tidens viktigste litterære skikkelser, blant andre Ingeborg Bachmann og Thomas Bernard - og har siden 1968 vært bosatt i . Milano. I tillegg til å ha utgitt seks skjønnlitterære bøker, deriblant debut-romanen Tuktens lykkelige år (Solum 1998), som skulle bli hennes store gjennombrudd, og Proleterka (Solum 2003), har hun oversatt verker av Marcel Schwob og Thomas de Quincy til italiensk, og skrevet om John Keats og Robert Walser. Novellesamlingen Jeg er broren til XX kom ut i Italia i 2014 og er hennes første skjønnlitterære utgivelse på tretten år. Dette er den tredje av Fleur Jaeggys bøker som er oversatt til norsk.

Proleterka er navnet på et jugoslavisk skip som ligger ankret ved kai i Venezia. Det venter på sine passasjerer som skal være med på et cruise til Hellas. For de fleste vil det bli et cruise med underholdning under solen, men ikke for fortelleren. Hun er 16 år og har fått fri fra et strengt jentepensjonat, for å være med sin ukjente far på cruise. En for henne fremmed mann som hun kun husker fra sin tidlige barndom.

Compressed, delicate, but brutally precise, S. S. Proleterka is a fiercely boiled-down bildungsroman from the presiding genius of dry-ice, Fleur Jaeggy. The S. S. Proleterka is a Yugoslavian ship; our fifteen-year-old protagonist and her financially ruined, distant, yet somehow beloved father, Johannes, take a cruise together on it to Greece. With a strange telescopic perspective, narrated from the day she receives her father's ashes, our heroine recounts her youth: her re-married mother, cold and far away, allows the father the rare visit to the child, stashed away with relatives or at a school for girls. "The journey to Greece, father and daughter. The last and first chance to be together." On board the S. S. Proleterka, she has a violent, carnal schooling with the sailors: "I had no experience of the other part of the world, the male part." Mesmerized by the desire to be experienced, she crisply narrates her trysts as well as her near-total neglect of her father. A ferocious study of distance and diffidence, S. S. Proleterka bottles at one hundred and eighty proof the "insomniac resentment" and cyclical nature of familial pain. Jaeggy's distillation of childhood is brought into English with telegraphic urgency by Alastair McEwen, the acclaimed translator of Umberto Eco and Alessandro Baricco, and the emotions pressed out between Jaeggy's lines are enough to fill a tome of a thousand pages.