The Dark and Dreamlike World of Fleur Jaeggy

Tim Parks, novelist and translator, says he came across a copy of Fleur Jaeggy’s novella, I beati anni del castigo, while browsing in an Italian bookshop. His translation of it, Sweet Days of Discipline, won the John Florio Prize in 1992. One can see why he was so attracted to this brief tale of boarding school life and its dark consequences. Jaeggy’s works are a translator’s dream: short, lucid and complex. Her distinctive vocabulary and syntax move elegantly and it would seem effortlessly into the English language. The translator has time to weigh and to discriminate: none of the slog here of translating long volumes against the clock. Parks could consider, and refine, and he has done so to fine effect. It is a compliment to his version that one wishes at times to consult the original, to see how the smooth transition was made.

Fleur Jaeggy is multi-lingual and has also worked as a translator. Swiss by birth, born in Zurich in 1940 into an upper-class family, she writes in Italian, but she has also translated into Italian Thomas De Quincey’s The Last Days of Immanuel Kant and Marcel Schwob’s Imaginary Lives.

In These Possible Lives (2017, translated by Minna Zallman Proctor) she offers three very short biographical sketches of Keats, De Quincey, and the fin-de-siècle symbolist orientalist Jewish Parisian Schwob. Schwob is a character best known to me, bizarrely, as a kind friend to Arnold Bennett in his lonely Paris days; more pertinently, he was a friend of Stéphane Mallarmé and Alfred Jarry, and is said to have influenced Borges. Her three subjects are loosely linked by opium, by malady, by a delectatio morosa or morbid delight, and her essays are prose poems rather than factual narrations. She does not give facts or dates, but tells us of Wordsworth’s habit of cutting the pages of books with a butter knife, of De Quincey’s nightmares, of Schwob’s love for a tubercular working-class girl and her dolls, of Keats begging “in a lucid delirium” for more laudanum. Their hallucinatory intensity and heightened language recall the prose poems of Baudelaire’s Le Spleen de Paris, with their invocations of wine and hashish, their pose of le poète maudit.

Jaeggy invokes Baudelaire in Sweet Days of Discipline – recently republished by the independent imprint And Other Stories – along with the Brontës and Novalis, and on the very first page, Robert Walser. Walser was a German-speaking Swiss writer who died in the Appenzell snow in 1956, after decades spent in various sanatoria and institutions; the novella is set in a boarding school in the same region and in the same mountainous but prettified and half-tamed landscape, described as “an Arcadia of sickness”. Thus we are confronted from the start with premonitions of doom and decline and ill-health – the mountains inevitably suggest tuberculosis and Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain.

The frame of literary reference is wide and multicultural, reminding us that Switzerland is the linguistic crossroads of western Europe, and the text is sprinkled with German and French phrases – the heavy German Zwang, the softer French faisandé and carnet de bal. The narrator speaks in German to her father, Herr Doktor, but in French to Frédérique, the slightly older fellow pupil with whom she becomes (for life, as emerges in later short stories) obsessed.

The story is deceptively simple. It opens: “At 14 I was a boarder in a school in the Appenzell”, and we discover that the narrator is a lonely and isolated girl who has spent her life in institutions, rarely hearing from her mother in Brazil, spending uncomfortable vacations with her father and dancing in hotel ballrooms with his elderly acquaintances. She is uneasy in her relationships with her fellow boarders, and mildly repelled by her room-mate, a German girl from Nuremberg who wears bright white underwear and files her nails and combs her curls and dreams of lovers. She describes her own condition with a chilly understated dignity. “I hardly got any letters. They were handed out at mealtime. It wasn’t nice not to get much post.”

The atmosphere of an all-female community of adolescent girls is powerfully conveyed; it is a stagnant hothouse world of spying and of “crushes” (passione in Italian), of teachers who have favourites, of girls waiting for Daddy to come to dance with them at the school ball, or to whisk them away at the end of term in a black Mercedes. There are echoes of other novels in the boarding-school genre: the references to the Brontës are not accidental, though the food at the Bausler Institut is much better than the burnt porridge of Jane Eyre’s Lowood, and the narrator is reprimanded for dunking her bread in her coffee “out of sheer greed”.

Villette also hovers behind the text, and Mme Beck shares characteristics with the solid head of the Institut, Frau Hofstetter, “broad as a cupboard in a blue tailleur”, who takes a fancy to the only black girl in the school, daughter of the president of an African state, a child who is clearly tubercular. It is suggested that the standard of teaching is high, though our heroine is interested only in French literature.

Those who have attended a girls’ boarding school will recognise the rituals – the obligatory pairing off for walks, the pigeon holes too often empty, the keeping of locked diaries, the emphasis on the neat folding of clothes in cupboards, the packing of trunks at the end of term. (I am embarrassed to be reminded of how pleased I was when the maths teacher, a severe woman whom I with reason feared, told me I was learning to be “a good little packer” as she supervised the row of trunks laid out in the school gym – laid out, Jaeggy would have written, like coffins. (School lockers, Jaeggy says, are “the dear little mortuary of our thoughts”.)

Jaeggy insists that convents and girls’ schools are inevitably full of spies. “A boarding school is a strong institution, since in a sense it is founded on blackmail.” The question of whether Catholic or Protestant schools are more prone to blackmail is raised but not answered; the narrator had been to a Catholic convent before the Bausler, and her father is Protestant, but her sensibility is caught in the baroque swirls and eddies of Swiss theology and practice. In Muriel Spark’s The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, a study of the intensity of relationships in a girls’ day school in Edinburgh, we remember that the pupil who betrays Miss Brodie, Sandy, converts to Catholicism (like Spark) and at the end of the novel is seen clutching at the bars of her grille, as if to escape. It is a disturbing image, and one that Jaeggy would have recognised.

The narrator is mesmerised by her bold and free-thinking friend Frédérique, and their complex relationship – not physical, but une amitié amoureuse – lives on after their schooldays into a bleak, dreamlike aftermath as Frédérique becomes mentally ill, tries to burn down her mother’s house in Geneva, and is institutionalised, this time forever.

This short work is packed with violent premonitions, sudden deaths, stabbings, hangings and the language of insanity. There are metaphors drawn from shrouds, altar cloths, coffins, corpses, funeral marches, gallows, guillotines, nooses, cults of the dead and, most affecting of all, stone tablets set in churchyard walls. We are all dying, even as children: as Rilke believed, we carry our deaths within us. Frédérique tells the narrator she has an old woman’s hands; the schoolgirls inhabit “a sort of senile childhood” and they have “a mortuary look”.

Frédérique reappears in a volume of short stories, I Am the Brother of XX (translated by Gini Alhadeff), suggesting there was or is a real-life source, along with other sketches which are overtly autobiographical and introduce us to Oliver Sacks, Italo Calvino, Jaeggy’s husband the writer and publisher Roberto Calasso, and, most significantly, the Austrian poet Ingeborg Bachmann.

The fictional stories deal with by now familiar motifs of arson, ill health, insomnia, suicide, isolation, hauntings, vendettas and murder: some are Gothic tales of the supernatural, featuring ghosts and saints and mandrakes. We learn in “An Encounter in the Bronx” that Jaeggy herself, morbidly sensitive to cold, types in fingerless gloves, indoors, swaddled in layers of clothing. The prose here has grown even more staccato and poetic: here are the orchids from a sinister tale of jealousy, “Agnes”: “Growing in the damp. White, with purple eyelets. Rosy, pale, an evil expression. Acidulous. Yellow. They last a long time. Not much earth. Not much nourishment. They reawaken in the dark, at night. Avid for company. When they wilt, they become small skulls in tuxedos.” These are flowers from the world of Sylvia Plath: death blooms, fleurs du mal. And death haunts: the death of Sissi, Empress of Austria, assassinated on the shores of Lake Geneva in 1898; the suicide of the Austrian poet and painter Adalbert Stifter, who cut his throat in Linz in 1868 (English-language readers have to look these events up: there are no notes).

There is no note to tell you the background to the shortest piece of all, a single paragraph called “The Aseptic Room”. It begins: “Once with Ingeborg we talked about old age, she smiled at that word, but that word was accompanied neither by the heart nor by a real smile.” The aseptic room is in the burns unit of the hospital of Sant’Eugenio in Rome, and it is clear that we are reading of the death of Ingeborg Bachmann in 1973, who, like Barbara Hepworth, appears to have set her bedroom on fire with a lighted cigarette. Bachmann was a very well-known poet and dramatist, whose long correspondence with Paul Celan, master of the elliptical short poem, was recently turned into a film, The Dreamed Ones.

She also appears, more happily, in the last recollection in the volume, “The Saltwater House”, an episode that brings her back to life in the summer of 1971, as she and Jaeggy set off together for a summer month in Poveromo on the Tuscan coast in an Alfa Romeo 2600. The house was vast, the water salt, the tea disgusting and the garden sickly, but they seem to have a good time, with visits from writers and publishers and Jaeggy’s husband-to-be, Calasso. The second sentence of this episode must be one of the most everyday sentences that Jaeggy ever wrote: “Ingeborg Bachmann manned the road maps.” They did not know then how near the end of the journey was. But Jaeggy writes, simply, “I would have liked it to go on a long time. And always.”

Girls’ schools and Gothic: inside the dark and dreamlike world of Swiss writer Fleur Jaeggy. By Margaret Drabble.  The  New Statesman,  April 2, 2018.

If Fleur Jaeggy is less well known than many of her European contemporaries — writers like Joseph Brodsky and Thomas Bernhard — it’s perhaps because her books are small and few. But over the past four decades the 77-year-old Swiss Italian writer has given us at least two real masterpieces: “Sweet Days of Discipline” (1989, translated by Tim Parks), and “S.S. Proleterka” (2001, translated by Alastair McEwen). These are haunting books, both with narrators struggling to retrieve a past that exists only in their memory and through notes and photographs. Like W. G. Sebald’s novels, they depict the mind in a holding pattern, circling around subjects that, being absent, can never be reached.

In both these books, Jaeggy recounts a Swiss childhood in the 1940s and 1950s, seemingly a lot like her own: boarding school, a tyrannical grandmother, a divorced mother and father both geographically and emotionally remote. As a writer, she is foremost a portraitist, describing figures from the past as they moved into and out of her narrators’ lives. A fellow student “had a fine, high forehead, the kind of forehead that makes thought tangible.” A father’s journal entries, read years after he has died, are “silent and absent. Names and dates. Nothing else. Written by a man even more absent, precise in his absence.” It’s hard to capture in a line or two the strange precision of Jaeggy’s prose, even harder to explain why her often halting short sentences and sudden shifts in tense or perspective are wonderful rather than irritating. The writing moves the way a camera might, circling around, trying to capture its subject from various angles at once. Out of many perspectives emerge people rescued from paling memory, and “if their faces are forgotten, if certain features have faded, as in a painting, all that remains are our own voices, which we feel can’t be answered.”

Now two new Fleur Jaeggy books arrive, very different from one another, both turning her interest in portraiture into a theme in itself. The first, “I Am the Brother of XX,” is a collection of stories, monologues and memoir, less cohesive than her previous books but with the same stark, surprising prose, here translated by Gini Alhadeff. These are grim tales, often violent. In “The Heir,” an old woman signs over her estate to a young assistant who leaves her to die in a house fire. In “The Aviary,” a man psychologically tortures his wife out of an obsessive love for his dead mother. The title story and a few others are less traumatic, and there are some lovely personal remembrances, mostly of literary friends. Yet even in these softer, melancholic pieces, darkness seems never far away, and literally isn’t, since much of the book is filled with tales of death and madness.

It is also filled, to an uncanny degree, with actual portraits. In “The Last of the Line,” an old man sits before paintings of his long-dead siblings before shooting his dogs and committing suicide. In “The Black Lace Veil,” a woman holding a photograph of her dead mother sees desperation in her eyes, “and felt a pang of love for her mother who perhaps had always hidden from her that she was terribly unhappy and let herself be discovered in a photograph.” For Jaeggy, a painting or photograph is a doorway to the dead, and entering through it involves existential risk. “It is the unknown,” she writes. “It is the abyss.”

That same abyss is visited with a lighter heart and more graceful wit in “These Possible Lives,” a collection of three biographical essays, lyrically translated by Minna Zallman Proctor. It’s an eclectic group: Thomas De Quincey, John Keats and the late-19th century French symbolist Marcel Schwob (who is woefully underrepresented in English, though his books are now being published by Wakefield Press). Other than shared roots in Romanticism, the only thing these three seem to have in common is that Jaeggy is the Italian translator of both De Quincey’s “The Last Days of Immanuel Kant” and Schwob’s “Imaginary Lives,” two books that take an elliptical approach to biography, less interested in historical events than in rendering the tone of a life, its uniqueness. “The book that describes a man in all his irregularities will be a work of art,” Schwob wrote. A true biographer, he declared, “must create human characteristics amidst the chaos.”

With “These Possible Lives,” Jaeggy becomes an heir to this genre of biography, with Schwob and De Quincey now subjects and Keats a poetic third. “His sister Jane lived three years,” she writes of De Quincey. “When she died, Thomas thought that she would come back, like a crocus. Children who grow up in the country know about death; they can, in a manner of speaking, see their own bones out the window.” Keats, we learn, “is unable to contemplate himself,” though Wordsworth “predicted great acclaim for him based on his appearance.” Schwob “inherited an ample forehead, sensual mouth, and a sad half smile in his eyes.” All his life he longed for an adventure, though when he finally had one it proved disappointing.

Brilliant, associative and short, Jaeggy’s essays have the beauty and economy of poems but the souls of portraits, discovering “human characteristics amidst the chaos” — which fairly describes her project overall.

Fleur Jaeggy’s Portraits of Past Lives.  By Martin Riker. The New York Times,  November 3, 2017.

“The house was  built like a fortress,” Fleur Jaeggy writes, “isolated from the rest of the village, and isolated in the mind of the rest of the world.” Jaeggy’s stories take place in boarding schools, snowy mountain ranges, and in solitary mansions on cliffs. “The town has few inhabitants. The houses are surrounded by a wall,” she writes. “There are no shops. But twice a week a siren announces that the provisions truck has arrived.” Another narrator plainly states, “I live alone. I earn enough on my salary.” Jaeggy’s characters live in a solitary abyss; maybe Jaeggy does, too.

Jaeggy was born in Switzerland but writes in Italian and lives in Milan. I Am the Brother of XX, her new story collection from New Directions and her fourth book in English, is translated by Gini Alhadeff. Her two novels and one other story collection are difficult to find: there are only a few copies left in stock on Amazon, and from where I write, in Providence, Rhode Island, just one copy of one of her books exists in the Rhode Island Public Library system.

The few interviews with Fleur Jaeggy that exist are mostly in Italian. In the single recent interview in English in TANK magazine, Jaeggy mostly redirects the interviewer’s questions about her life and writing into anecdotes about animals she has known. Her brief Wikipedia page says that when she left Switzerland and moved to Rome, she met Thomas Bernhard. The two of them make sense together: both are experimentalists, philosophers, and obsessives. Both layer narrative and lyric purposes into each line; both find the strange remote corners of the soul and recline into them. But even this relationship is shrouded in mystery — there’s no way of knowing how much time Jaeggy and Bernhard even spent together. Though she’s been publishing in Italian since 1968 and a decade hasn’t passed without one or two of her books being released, she has very little footprint in English. Like the characters in her stories, she seems to be set apart from the world.

Susan Sontag once admiringly called Jaeggy a savage writer. You need to be, to write these stories about loners and orphans with such levity. Fleur Jaeggy is like Edward Gorey without the monsters, or Lemony Snicket without the slapstick, though she can be funny, in a sinister way. “Once when I was eight years old my grandmother asked me, what will you do when you grow up?” Jaeggy writes in the title story about a strange pair of siblings. “I answered, I want to die. I want to die. I want to die when I grow up. I want to die soon. And I think my sister really liked that answer.”

A genius of rich, terse prose, Jaeggy writes paragraphs that are gorgeous labyrinths. One sentence pulls ahead, the next circles back to reexamine something from earlier, and the next one might dead-end or take you somewhere entirely new — but to the characters and the reader by extension, it all happens simultaneously. Like great photographs or paintings, Jaeggy’s writing pulls your attention in, and then lets it wander. You can spend a long time in a Jaeggy paragraph, staying behind for the fun of it even once you know the way out.

From the crystalline prose emerge scenarios with sinister motifs. In a story about an old unmarried woman taking in a 10-year-old orphan girl, Jaeggy writes:

The fräulein is a kind woman, wilted and very lonely. And solitude had made her even kinder, she practically apologized. Lonely people are often afraid to let their solitude show. Some are ashamed. Families are so strong. They have all of advertising on their side. But a person alone is nothing but a shipwreck. First they cast it adrift, then they let it sink […] That afternoon, the air was becoming stifling. “I am about to faint,” said Fraulein von Oelix. It was a lucky thing that the girl was there. So calm, tranquil, not gripped by panic.

The building is on fire, and Hannelore, the orphan, is so calm that she enjoys the blazing experience during her escape. She doesn’t even call the firefighters. She admires the fire’s ability to annihilate. “She doesn’t even have a past. Or a birthday,” Jaeggy writes. “She sprang from trash and to trash will return. She sprang from the swamps of the dead. And to the swamps she will return. That is why the fraulein took her in.”

In a story about a small girl who takes wicked advantage of a lonely old woman — not for her money, but for the joy of destruction — Jaeggy achieves the surreal pitch of conveying that this is a fulfilling situation for them both. In one scene, the fraulein watches Hannelore dress her naked body. Jaeggy writes: “Hannelore did so slowly, almost like a professional. To please the fraulein.” The fraulein decides to sign over her entire estate. She announces, “[Hannelore], you will be my heir.” She’s exhilarated by the prospect of leaving everything to a destitute girl. Soon after that, Hannelore burns the Fraulein von Oelix’s house down and kills her. Not for the money. Not for any reason, really. “[E]veryone believes there is a why, in human gestures and impulses,” Jaeggy writes. “The girl saw her thoughts on the window panes like insects swollen with blood on the walls of a room. Her thoughts distant, detached, as though someone else’s […] What does thinking matter? Thinking is iniquitous.”

Jaeggy’s interest in her characters alternates fluidly between amusement and disregard. In a story about a cat killing a butterfly, an apt metaphor for the way Jaeggy handles her creatures, she writes, “It’s as though [the cat] has forgotten the fluttering wings that only moments earlier had inspired his total dedication. That which had possessed him before, as though it were an idea, a thought. Now he pulls away. Looks elsewhere.” The brief moments when Jaeggy shows a version of warmth toward her characters are quickly abandoned; she more often leaves people physically and emotionally stranded.

But somehow Jaeggy doesn’t treat her characters unkindly; she treats them in the manner in which they have grown comfortable. In a story in which a woman shares a moment with a fish in the restaurant tank, the woman observes about herself, “My hands get cold. My neck. I am cold in a way I am tempted to call internal, a terrible word, but never mind. An internal cold. Frost within.” The woman is uncomfortable around other people, particularly her easily overheated husband. She’d rather just be alone.

In a story fittingly titled “The Last of the Line,” Jaeggy writes about a rich man named Caspar. Caspar’s parents and brothers are dead, and Caspar is all that is left of his family. His dogs follow him through the house, submissive, exhausted, and shaking with tremors. Caspar stands looking at his families’ portraits in the long hallway:

The last generation are children. Anton, seven years old, and Stefan, nine. They stand, their apathetic expressions sweet as can be. They are Caspar’s brothers. After sitting for the portrait, they seem to say: “We are no longer here.” And more or less that’s what happened.

This story captures the tension in Jaeggy’s writing between the desire to be apart from the world and the expectation to stay within it. Again and again, Caspar returns to the long hallway where he watches his dead family members watching him. Did they expect something more from him? Probably yes, just as they probably imagined something different for themselves. Caspar draws up a will, even though he has nobody to leave anything to, not even the dogs after he shoots them. Then at the age of 79, he turns the gun on himself. “The funeral was grand,” Jaeggy writes at the end of the story. “The old people of Rhäzüns and the children, too, followed the carriage, dancing almost. The carriage like a dead ship, slid over the snow, giddy and mute.”

The writer Fleur Jaeggy most reminds me of, though Danish and from a different generation, is Dorthe Nors. Nors had her English language debut with a slim collection called Karate Chop, then a combined set of experimental novellas called So Much for That Winter. Mirror, Shoulder, Signal, which was shortlisted for the 2017 Man Booker International Prize, is coming to the United States in 2018. Jaeggy and Nors both formulate sentences and paragraphs that demonstrate faith in the reader, that don’t stop to explain or fill you in but barrel forward with the accurate understanding that if you surround a reader with vivid sensory detail, they’ll come with you. They’ll want to chase you. They’ll catch up.

In Nors’s story “Do You Know Jussi?” she writes about a suitor leaving a family’s home right after he has possibly molested the daughter upstairs. The story starts after the act has already ended, and there is just stillness and household noises and smells. Nors writes,

[E]verything is quiet again, apart from her older brother turning on the shower across the hall […] [S]he is lying on the bed with a pillow between her knees. She can still feel the wetness of his saliva just beneath her nose, and his fingers. He made an effort to be nice, that was it, and she turns on the TV.

Like Jaeggy, Nors will stop and study something, then skip three moves ahead, then go back to a thought from earlier. Thrillingly, she keeps the reader with her.

In “Adelaide,” one of the more heartwarming stories in Jaeggy’s collection, an abandoned mother and son share a love for payback. The story opens with Adelaide drinking beer by herself in the dark kitchen. Her baby is in his outgrown crib in the next room. She’s thinking about the priest who wronged her, who wouldn’t baptize her son. The priest judges her for having a child out of wedlock, though Adelaide is thinking about how this man had preyed on her and her sister. “And you dip your filthy fingers into the holy water,” Adelaide thinks. “You’ll kneel before me so that I might punish you with a whip.”

The pitch-black setup and pursuit here epitomizes the register of a Jaeggy story. A mother wants to kill the priest who once seduced her and now won’t baptize her son, but she’s too timid to do it on her own, so she waits for her son to grow up and help her. While too much darkness can be claustrophobic, in Jaeggy’s case it lends itself to expansiveness and explosions. You don’t know what’s coming next, but you keep running into things. In “Adelaide,” the boy’s deadbeat father comes to visit, and the son drives a knife through his father’s heart. The mother and son get drunk, then take the body and bury it. “[N]ow it was the priest’s turn. They had waited too long already,” Jaeggy writes. “Together they got to work.”

Jaeggy seems nearly on the verge of dropping from cultural awareness, though perhaps this year that will change, with the release of I Am the Brother of XX alongside a set of her essays. She achieves more in a paragraph than many can pull off in an entire story; there’s very little out there that resembles Jaeggy’s dark and surreal intensity. Though I’m inclined to say Fleur Jaeggy deserves to be popular, based on her characters, stories, and her slim biography, she seems to like being left alone. Maybe there’s a good reason she’s not a bigger literary figure. Maybe that’s how she prefers it.

From Isolated Places: Fleur Jaeggy’s “I Am the Brother of XX”.  By Nathan Scott McNamara. Los Angeles Review of Books  , August 7, 2017.

SS Proleterka was the last of Fleur Jaeggy’s currently available translated works that I had left to read and I did not want it to end. I used to think Sweet Days of Discipline was my favourite but this novel is far more subtle, real, and painful. And with none of the gothic overtones that creep into so much of her other work. A most dispassionate and restrained coming of age story, it is cold, calculated, yet charged with a deep, sorrowful beauty.

Central to this novella is the account of a cruise to Greece that the unnamed narrator and her father take when she is fifteen years old. It will turn out to be the last opportunity they have to get to know each other. Her parents separated when she was young, and she was deposited with her maternal grandmother, leaving her father effectively exiled from her life, forced to request time with his daughter—applications that were frequently denied or strictly curtailed. To have two weeks together over the Easter holidays is unprecedented, and precious, but unlikely to resolve the existing distance between parent and child. They are too much alike, too accustomed to emotional self-preservation. But, with almost surgical precision, Jaeggy’s crystalline prose exposes the currents of repressed affection that run deep beneath the surface of their relationship.

Our protagonist is looking back from mid-life, at her childhood and youth. She offers an unsentimental, clinical assessment of her own experiences, emotions, and interactions. It is a learned response to the world. Occasionally she speaks of “my father”, but most commonly she refers to him by his first name, Johannes. With respect to herself, she alternates between first person and third, talking of “Johannes’ daughter,” “she” or “the girl”—at times employing all three in the same paragraph. She is thus able to step back and place herself within the regard (or lack thereof) of others. Detachment is her means of coping.

As a young girl, she tells us, she lived with Orsola, her mistress or “the mother of my mother, of her who had been Johannes’ wife.” After her own parents’ divorce, her father’s parents who had moved south for the health of their other son, an invalid, lost the textile factory that had been in the family for generations. Johannes lost his inheritance and his wealth. For the narrator, her father’s family hold a tragic fascination. She does not know them beyond their photographic images. But then she hardly knows her father any better. It is her mother’s family who control her destiny, which will ultimately be boarding school. She is disposable and knows it early on. Still, she describes her “quasi-glacial” relationship with her maternal grandmother as the most intense she ever had, even if she is at a loss to know if she felt affection for the woman:

Orsola treats me like an adult. Like a peer. Obedience does not mean subordination. I close all the shutters. I do not open them in the mornings. A continuous closing. I close the day. Closing is order. It is a form of detachment. An ephemeral preparation for death. An exercise. It was entirely natural that that woman and the garden corresponded to the vision of a happy land. How much time did I still have at my disposal? The curtains at the window are fragile, almost dust. And she, the mistress, looks like a white plaster bust.

If her relationship with Orsola is formal and defined by expectation, her mother exists almost entirely in absentia. She is “Johannes’ wife.” By the time the protagonist is recounting her tale, she too is dead. Her daughter has only her jewels and her piano to remember her by. It is the Steinway, purchased in New York and carried across the ocean to Europe, that is the narrator’s closest connection to her mother. As an object resting in a specially prepared room, she endows it with personality, demonstrating an intimacy she could never find with the pianist who once played it:

You do not want me to touch your keys yet. My fingers are unfamiliar to you. That slight hint of carnality. But I am sitting beside you. I watch over you. In the first years I always kept the door closed. I wanted to be sure that no one came in. You alone, locked in. Now no longer. Now I allow you more freedom. And at the same time I allow myself more freedom too. I have become wiser. Before, if I felt resentment, it seeped into my veins, my eyes, my thoughts. An insomniac resentment.

Aboard the SS Proleterka, the connection between father and daughter is marked by a formality that neither can seem to breach. They have, she has told us, always been able to “perceive the exceedingly fine line between equilibrium and desperation.” By the time they are on this shared voyage, the daughter on the cusp of womanhood and the father aging quickly, they can no longer negotiate that line. The ship has been chartered by the Guild to which Johannes has belonged since he was a student. Having fallen into poverty, he is treated by his peers with a measure of pity. He is awkward, out of step. His daughter, meanwhile, is looking to test other waters while they are out to sea. As the voyage progresses, she engages in a number of rather abrupt sexual encounters with several of the officers. She is being used and she knows it, but she wants the experience. She likes and dislikes it at once. Having been raised by a family who could not show love, she seems unable to accept more than brute affection. Yet there is also the sense that she wants to evoke a reaction in Johannes, protective, angry, disappointed—anything—but if he registers her absences from their cabin he refuses to show it.

Day by day, their extended visit slips away. Trips ashore to visit ruins and others sites, exhaust Johannes and confuse his daughter. At Knossos, for example, his sadness weighs on her and distracts her:

I should pay attention to the woman’s explanations, says Johannes; I continue to look at her white gloves, the seams of her stockings. Her calves. “Höre, höre zu,” says Johannes, listen. I cannot catch her words. Only in my mind’s eye can I grasp what I see. The words are too much. And the light is extremely bright. The journey is important for Johannes. The journey to Greece, father and daughter. The last and first chance to be together. But we do not know this. Or perhaps he does.

There will be no magic breakthrough on this voyage, nor in any of the remaining visits the narrator makes to have dinner with her father in the hotel where he lives. There is an emotional stasis that defines their relationship and in a strange way it suits them. The narrator’s father will be long dead before she really confronts the importance of their bond. And even then it is stretched taut and unarticulated.

Perfectly paced and tightly controlled, the devastating power of SS Proleterka lies in the way Jaeggy manages to capture the complicated and unexpressed affection that underlie even the most strained parent-child relationships, while demonstrating the lengths to which a child who knows they have been disposed of will go to maintain a sense of identity. Self-preservation requires distance. If the narrator seems dispassionate at times, she is also resilient and real.

SS Proleterka is translated from the Italian by Alastair McEwen who maintains a remarkably clean, even tone throughout, seamlessly incorporating the German dialogue, and allowing the stark beauty of Jeaggy’s prose to shine. Highly recommended.

The truth has no ornaments: SS Proleterka by Fleur Jaeggy. By Joseph Schreiber. roughghosts, March 31, 2018.

                Dutch translation of  I beati anni del castigo. (originally published in 1989) from 1990.

              Dutch translation of La paura del cielo.  (originally published in 1994) from 1996.