Overview

Family, obsession, and privilege boiled down by the icy-hot Swiss-Italian master stylist Fleur Jaeggy. Even among Jaeggy’s singular and intricate works, The Water Statues is a shiningly peculiar book. Concerned with loneliness and wealth’s odd emotional poverty, this early novel is in part structured as a play: the dramatis personae include the various relatives, friends, and servants of a man named Beeklam, a wealthy recluse who keeps statues in his villa’s flooded basement, where memories shiver in uncertain light and the waters run off to the sea. Fleshed out with Jaeggy’s austere yet voluptuous style, The Water Statues delivers like a slap an indelible picture of the swampiness of family life. ‘Reading Jaeggy is not unlike diving naked and headlong into a bramble of black rose bushes, so intrigued you are by their beauty: it’s a swift, prickly undertaking, and you emerge the other end bloodied all over’ -Daniel Johnson, The Paris Review

Full Product Details

9781913505448

Table of Contents

Reviews

'Stark, surprising prose. It's hard to capture in a line or two the strange precision of Jaeggy's prose. Darkness seems never far away.' Martin Riker, New York Times Book Review ---- 'It is hard not to be impressed by Jaeggy's own spiritual and aesthetic grandeur, which casts her stories in such a compellingly cool light. She, too, has a startling ability to go beyond: beyond the sentimental heart, the writerly niceties, the conventions that bind us, and the messy effusions of contemporary life. She once said, in an interview, One should be in one's own void. Void is silence. Solitude. An absence of relationships. . . . The void is a plant that must continually be watered. It is our good fortune that she sits at her swamp-green typewriter, watering it.' Sheila Heti, The New Yorker ---- 'Jaeggy's astute compression of narrative detail is at once serene and startling. Beneath a placid, opalescent surface lurks a threat of violence that may or may not be realised, but which contributes to the profound impression that people and their lives are unpredictable, coursing with icy, barren wildness.' Emily Labarge, Los Angeles Review of Books ---- 'Jaeggy seems to have crushed a glass in her palm and tweezed out a few shards for the page. Her prose is indeed extraordinary - it is also frightening.' The Rumpus ---- 'Reading Jaeggy is not unlike diving naked and headlong into a bramble of black rose bushes, so intrigued you are by their beauty: it's a swift, prickly undertaking, and you emerge the other end bloodied all over.' Daniel Johnson, The Paris Review ---- 'It is thrilling to live in Jaeggy's worlds, which are so intense they threaten to boil over.' Publishers Weekly ---- 'A beautiful but inscrutable book about disconnection and the passage of time.' Kirkus ---- 'In this strange and shimmering nonlinear text from Swiss writer Jaeggy, the lonely children of the wealthy and their eccentric employees negotiate the boundary between companionship and solitude...In short, enjoyably expressionistic sections, Jaeggy sketches the emotional lives of people marooned but not content to remain entirely alone. What emerges is a fascinating and memorable portrait of a milieu obsessed with the passing of time.' Publishers Weekly

‘Stark, surprising prose. It’s hard to capture in a line or two the strange precision of Jaeggy’s prose. Darkness seems never far away.’ Martin Riker, New York Times Book Review ---- ‘It is hard not to be impressed by Jaeggy’s own spiritual and aesthetic grandeur, which casts her stories in such a compellingly cool light. She, too, has a startling ability to go beyond: beyond the sentimental heart, the writerly niceties, the conventions that bind us, and the messy effusions of contemporary life. She once said, in an interview, “One should be in one’s own void. Void is silence. Solitude. An absence of relationships. . . . The void is a plant that must continually be watered.” It is our good fortune that she sits at her swamp-green typewriter, watering it.’ Sheila Heti, The New Yorker ---- ‘Jaeggy’s astute compression of narrative detail is at once serene and startling. Beneath a placid, opalescent surface lurks a threat of violence that may or may not be realised, but which contributes to the profound impression that people and their lives are unpredictable, coursing with icy, barren wildness.’ Emily Labarge, Los Angeles Review of Books ---- ‘Jaeggy seems to have crushed a glass in her palm and tweezed out a few shards for the page. Her prose is indeed extraordinary – it is also frightening.’ The Rumpus ---- ‘Reading Jaeggy is not unlike diving naked and headlong into a bramble of black rose bushes, so intrigued you are by their beauty: it’s a swift, prickly undertaking, and you emerge the other end bloodied all over.’ Daniel Johnson, The Paris Review ---- ‘It is thrilling to live in Jaeggy’s worlds, which are so intense they threaten to boil over.’ Publishers Weekly ---- ‘A beautiful but inscrutable book about disconnection and the passage of time.’ Kirkus ---- ‘In this strange and shimmering nonlinear text from Swiss writer Jaeggy, the lonely children of the wealthy and their eccentric employees negotiate the boundary between companionship and solitude...In short, enjoyably expressionistic sections, Jaeggy sketches the emotional lives of people marooned but not content to remain entirely alone. What emerges is a fascinating and memorable portrait of a milieu obsessed with the passing of time.’ Publishers Weekly

Author Information

Fleur Jaeggy is a true original of European writing and has been translated into over twenty languages. The Times Literary Supplement named Proleterka as a Best Book of the Year upon its US publication, and her Sweet Days of Discipline won the Premio Bagutta and the Premio Speciale Rapallo. The author of The Sun at Midday and Diary of a Djinn, Gini Alhadeff translated Patrizia Cavalli's My Poems Won't Change the World and Fleur Jaeggy's I Am the Brother of XX.

Tab Content 6

Customer Reviews

Recent Reviews

Countries Available