Fleur Jaeggy

This superbly concentrated book of creative nonfiction should not be knocked back like a shot, but rather sipped slowly like a good grappa. It consists of three hyper-brief biographies of writers: De Quincey, Keats, and Marcel Schwob. The lives herein are, as the original title has it, ‘congetturali’, and yet the moments of poetic speculation are few and serve only to highlight the accuracy of a certain mood and tone associated with each subject.

It took Andrew Motion more than six show more hundred pages to tell the story of Keats's life. Jaeggy boils it down to fewer than twenty-five. ‘Walking on the heath, Keats came across a being with a strange light in its eyes, a rumpled archangel—he recognized Coleridge. They walked together and spoke of nightingales and dreams.’ Later, in the depths of his illness: ‘They soothed him with currant jellies and compotes, some of which dripped onto a Ben Jonson first edition.’

Her skill is in the chaining-together of telling detail with no extraneous links between them, a life in a small series of close-up photographs. But the images seem to be infused with mystic significance, so perhaps not so much photographs as tarot cards. Evoking the literary circle around De Quincey, she gives us the following paragraph, full of exact specificities but veiled in mystery because of how they are catalogued:

Henry Fuseli ate a diet of raw meat in order to obtain splendid dreams; Lamb spoke of “Lilliputian rabbits” when eating frog fricassee; and his sister Mary, wielding a knife, chased a little girl who was helping her in the kitchen and then stabbed her own mother through the heart; Hazlitt was perceptive about musculature and boxers; Wordsworth used a buttery knife to cut the pages of a first-edition Burke. Coleridge, his head shrouded in a fog, read poetry badly and moaned gloomily. The dreams of Jean Paul, the crow that loved the storm, reverberated across the Lake District. This was TDQ's Western Passage.

One senses how iconic anyone's life can become when reduced to a litany of camera-flash incidents. When Marcel Schwob travels through the South Seas, she concertinas the voyage down to the following:

In Colombo he drowsily contemplated the babel of religion. There were cartloads of people praying in a cavern, a Tamil feast. He was always tired and it was hard to breathe; the hot wind blew at him and dust and flies stuck to his skin. The Australian landscape seemed sinister, long cadaverous beaches where the brush moved in the wind like the gnarled hair of dead people. In Samoa they called him Tulapla, the talk man, and kept him up late into the night telling stories. He shook the hand of King Mataafa, who looked like Bismarck.

The translation into American English, from Minna Zallman Proctor, is generally excellent, although there are a couple of minor solecisms that apparently come from unfamiliarity with the British context: she writes of something costing ‘three or four guinea’ and of climbing ‘the Ben Nevis’. But that aside, this heady alembication of lives is a stimulating, provocative experience, and Jaeggy's brevity does succeed in finding a kind of truth that doorstop biographies can only ever circle around. show less

This is maybe my favorite type of writing. Short, direct. Every sentence carefully chosen and packed with meaning, distant but actually incisive. Unsettling maybe, with a violence to them that is personal. I could open at random and find 5 lines to quote, to think on. Words I liked from reviews: brutal, relentless, terse, deceptively casual, unnerving, enchanted and disturbed, contrary, impish.

Spoilers below

Haunting collection of loosely connected tales. Connected mostly by their macabre and decadent themes. The psychological horrors her characters inhabit creep up on you...

Boo!....Like that.

Scare you? No? Don't worry, Fleur Jaeggy will. And if she doesn't scare you, she'll certainly disturb you. And she'll do it in only 95 pages, comprising seven stories. Every story lingers, long after you've finished, like regrets.

In the title story, a husband thinks his wife is ill, as their show more golden anniversary approaches. He's disappointed too when she turns out not to be ill at all...well, not physically ill, as he thought. His wife doesn't much care for him wishing any kind of ill upon her, and does something discreet, though drastic, in triumphant retaliation.

An overly generous man, in "The Free House" has opened his large house to the mentally ill. He and his wife sleep in separate beds. The man's wife spies on these mentally ill while her husband sleeps. She spies on a promiscuous nineteen year-old girl in particular. Exciting! Though she'll soon wish she hadn't spied. What business do the so-called "sane" have spying on the so-called "insane" anyway?

In "The Twins," orphaned, identical twins, grow up loving only one another for the rest of their lives. I'll leave it at that.

A woman promised her father she'd find a good man to marry, in "The Promise". After he dies, in honor of his memory, she gives it a good go, and sleeps with three men in her village. Dissatisfied with all three, she's nevertheless quelled her conscience. She kept her promise to her father. She did her best to find a good man to marry. Not finding any, now she can live happily, as she is, and as her father never knew her to be, with the woman she's loved all along.

Fleur Jaeggy is a stylist's stylist. Her prose is concise. Absent are parentheticals and semi-colons. Digressions don't exist. Not to say her language isn't euphonious. Because it is. She makes her prose sound more like poetry than prose.

Jaeggy's minimalism is more minimal than Hemingway's, Carver's, and Didion's. She's heard the right words and placed them on the page in the precise order she heard them. Stripped down. Bare naked writing. Wordiness be banished, her wonderful writing declares. The irony of her minimalist style is that she packs abundant, maximal substance into each short piece. I can't wait to be eminently disturbed by her diminuitive work again. show less

Prose like cut-glass in an almost plotless tale of schoolgirl obsession. "Her looks were those of an idol, disdainful. Perhaps that was why I wanted to conquer her....The first thing I thought was she had been further than I had." I found it another of those oddly compelling novels I'm drawn to (like Pond) where not much happens but the writing sweeps you along.