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Sweet Days of Discipline (1989)

by Fleur Jaeggy

Other authors: See the other authors section.

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462853,269 (3.58)30
Fiction. Literature. LGBTQIA+ (Fiction.) HTML:

On the heels of I Am the Brother of XX and These Possible Lives, here is Jaeggy's fabulously witchy first book in English, with a new Peter Mendelsund cover

A novel about obsessive love and madness set in postwar Switzerland, Fleur Jaeggy's eerily beautiful novel begins innocently enough: "At fourteen I was a boarder in a school in the Appenzell." But there is nothing innocent here. With the off-handed remorselessness of a young Eve, the narrator describes her potentially lethal designs to win the affections of Fréderique, the apparently perfect new girl. In Tim Parks' consummate translation (with its "spare, haunting quality of a prose poem," TLS), Sweet Days of Discipline is a peerless, terrifying, and gorgeous wor… (more)
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» See also 30 mentions

English (7)  Spanish (1)  All languages (8)
Showing 1-5 of 7 (next | show all)
a strange, cold book that seems to borrow a lot from Duras' self-conscious literariness. it has beautiful turns of phrase and is quite moving in its evocation of underloved rich boarding school girls with their undeclared queerness, but i found the casual racism toward "the black girl" unpalatable and the novel was slight, i am not sure it'll linger with me. ( )
  boredgames | Jul 7, 2020 |
For starters: let it be clear that the title of this booklet (In English “Sweet days of Discipline”) is meant to be sarcastic. A woman looks back on her childhood, which she spent in different boarding schools in Switserland, a chilling story of suppressed feelings, coldness and gloom. On the surface, this seems like a rather classic coming-of-age novel, with all the usual ingredients of the stifling, over-disciplined life at a boarding school in Switzerland in the 1950s. But the reference, at the very beginning to Robert Walser is not an innocent link. That Swiss writer was the master of stories in which apparently nothing much happens, but which are imbued with the gravity and chillness of life, written in accurate, almost merciless prose.
And that is also the case with Jaeggy. For instance, the absent mother (who conducts her daughter's life from Brazil), and the cold, distant father who lives in hotel rooms, make clear that the unnamed narrative voice has been more or less left to her own fate. She seeks rapprochement with two other girls, one mysterious and detached, the other exuberantly extravert, with a suppressed sexual undertone, but that also not leads to much. There is a veil of gloom over the entire story, which also regularly contains references to death. Again, as with Walser, not much is happening, but it is mainly the intense, sombre atmosphere that makes this short booklet stand out; you cannot put your finger on it, but this story sticks, that’s for certain. ( )
  bookomaniac | Jan 30, 2020 |
3.5 stars. A compact and eerie account of a girl's boarding school experiences and relationships. Sweet Days of Disclipline is an atmospheric character sketch that works nicely because Jaeggy's writing, in Tim Parks's translation, is so concise.

(There's more on my blog here.) ( )
1 vote LizoksBooks | Dec 15, 2018 |
"Non basta dimenticare il nome per dimenticare l'essere" ( )
  Eva_Filoramo | May 3, 2018 |
This novel has the flavor of Dostoevsky's Notes from Underground combined with the clipped sentences of Robert Walser's Jakob von Gunten. Not un-coincidentally, the novel names Robert Walser in its first lines: "At fourteen I was a boarder in a school in the Appenzell. This is where Robert Walser used to take his many walks when he was in the mental hospital in Herisau, not far from our college. He died in the snow. Photographs show his footprints and the position of his body in the snow. We didn't know the writer."

What follows is a feminine parallel to Walser's novel,Jakob, the purported diary of a well-off young man who enrolls in a servant's school where he, according to Coetzee's review of it, reflects "on the education he receives there—an education in humility—and on the strange brother and sister who offer it."

In Jaeggy's reimagining, which I take to be an homage to Walser, the setting is the equally confining all-girl boarding school, and about how relationships formed there and the discipline learned there are always at risk of becoming fetishized. For the inhabitants of the girls' school, and for Jakob von Gunten, and for the man himself Walser, such discipline necessarily makes one go truly mad.

While the nihilistic narrator of Sweet Days of Discipline claims that she and her fellow boarders "didn't know the author," (i.e. either personally or through his works), they nevertheless come to know him--and madness--through their experiences in the shared landscape. ( )
  reganrule | Oct 20, 2016 |
Showing 1-5 of 7 (next | show all)
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» Add other authors (8 possible)

Author nameRoleType of authorWork?Status
Jaeggy, Fleurprimary authorall editionsconfirmed
Böttner, AnnegretTranslatorsecondary authorsome editionsconfirmed
Bignozzi, JuanaTranslatorsecondary authorsome editionsconfirmed
Bijman, LeontineTranslatorsecondary authorsome editionsconfirmed
Manganaro, Jean-PaulTranslatorsecondary authorsome editionsconfirmed
Melander, VivecaTranslatorsecondary authorsome editionsconfirmed
Munday, OliverCover designersecondary authorsome editionsconfirmed
Parks, TimTranslatorsecondary authorsome editionsconfirmed
Schaden, BarbaraTranslatorsecondary authorsome editionsconfirmed
Silađin, LadaTranslatorsecondary authorsome editionsconfirmed
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At fourteen I was a boarder in a school in Appenzell.
A quattordici anni ero educanda in un collegio dell'Appenzell.
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(Click to show. Warning: May contain spoilers.)
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Fiction. Literature. LGBTQIA+ (Fiction.) HTML:

On the heels of I Am the Brother of XX and These Possible Lives, here is Jaeggy's fabulously witchy first book in English, with a new Peter Mendelsund cover

A novel about obsessive love and madness set in postwar Switzerland, Fleur Jaeggy's eerily beautiful novel begins innocently enough: "At fourteen I was a boarder in a school in the Appenzell." But there is nothing innocent here. With the off-handed remorselessness of a young Eve, the narrator describes her potentially lethal designs to win the affections of Fréderique, the apparently perfect new girl. In Tim Parks' consummate translation (with its "spare, haunting quality of a prose poem," TLS), Sweet Days of Discipline is a peerless, terrifying, and gorgeous wor

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