Sweet Days of Discipline (New Directions Paperbook, 758) - Softcover

Jaeggy, Fleur; Parks, Tim

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0811212351 ISBN 13: 9780811212359

Verlag: New Directions, 1993

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This novel is like a walk down an unlit alley at night, alone, in the rain. The narrator is a girl at a boarding school in postwar Switzerland. Through her heightened senses we become aware of the awakening sexuality of the young girls far away from the familiarities of home and the impending doom and madness that lurk at the gate. Imprisoned in an artificial reality, she portrays the other inmates in a sardonic light. The narrator's friendship and obsession with the ideal new girl, Frederique, bring to mind lines from Baudelaire's Flowers of Evil : "Moment by moment, Time envelops me/ like a stiffening body buried in the snow.../ I contemplate the infinitesimal globe,/ and I no longer seek asylum there" ("Craving for Oblivion"). This is an excellent purchase for any library collecting experimental fiction.
- Peggie Partello, Keene State Coll., N.H.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Jaeggy, a Swiss-born writer living in Italy, gives her narrator an abundance of memorable lines describing a boarding school set in idyllic Switzerland. Recalling the constant machinations and undercurrents there, she comments, "A boarding school is like a harem." And she seems to be right: less time is spent studying than courting favored friends. The narrator is particularly intrigued by Frederique, a disdainful girl who claims that she has "an old woman's hands," which the narrator hears as a compliment. But then a frivolous new student named Micheline--she has red hair and looks "a bit like Gilda"--causes the narrator to abandon Frederique by promising that she will give a huge ball at which all the students will dance with her charming father. Tim Parks does an admirable job of keeping the ice-cold language flowing. But the novel leaves a sense that its story line is a metaphor for something else, although it is never completely clear what, and after a while this vague profundity starts to get tiring; the ambiguous ending does not improve matters.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Italian writer Jaeggy's fourth book but first to be published here: a short novel that intensely evokes the cruelties and tragedies that flourish in an ``Arcadia of sickness, where something serenely gloomy and a little sick is going on.'' The narrator recalls a time, in postwar Switzerland, when she was a 14-year-old student in a boarding-school for girls from all over the world. The students were mostly privileged but lonely girls like the narrator--whose mother had remarried and gone to Brazil and whose father lived in a succession of expensive hotels- -or like the homesick daughter of the president of an African country. The girls are still innocent, but ``there is something crude, pedantic, and affected about it, as if we were all dressed in plus fours and long socks.'' And, indeed, the innocent rivalries of competing friendships are tinged with a corrupting cruelty of ignorance and conformity. It is also a place where ``obedience and discipline set the tempo''--which seems to suit a new pupil, the learned and accomplished Frederique, whose presence obsesses the narrator. She wants Frederique to admire her, but Frederique is ``entire unto herself''--a person of great self-discipline whose conversations, though profound, suggest a basic nihilism. Finally, the narrator's strategy to win Frederique fails because ``I still thought that to get something you had to go straight for your goal whereas it is only distractions, uncertainty, distance that bring us closer to our targets, and then it is the targets which strike us.'' Memories of that time are followed by brief references to an adult life forever affected by Frederique, and the speaker's last meetings with the now-adult Frederique, who ``has become like a saint, the most disciplined of us all'' but ultimately obedient to the point of madness. Very European in its underwritten evocations of overwrought sensibilities, but beautifully crafted. A writer to watch. -- Copyright ©1993, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: New Directions
• Erscheinungsdatum: 1993
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0811212351
• ISBN 13: 9780811212359
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 102
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar