Fleur Jaeggy

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 work.

Sweet Days of Discipline

dagonet

At school - though, I think it goes without saying - she was top in everything.

I looked over to the window, and the window returned my expression and had me dozing off.

It's common knowledge that a new leader will hate the predecessor's favourites. A boarding school is like a harem.

Frederique told me I was an aesthete. It was a new word for me, but it immediately made sense.

My term of comparison for what I was doing was force. I must conquer her, she must admire me.

[...] I remember our conversations as always being surrounded by freshness.

[...] from the very first day I always felt, despite a certain inferiority on my part in comparison with her, that before becoming close we would have to go through certain phases. Like in a battle.

The French mistress looked like a sad man, especially in the light, near the window, behind the teacher's desk. She asked me questions. I didn't answer. She had short, grey wavy hair, hands like a priest's, pressed together. Behind her austere gaze it was as if she were trying to beg almost, there was a never-to-be-satisfied supplication, a purity even, the purity of a loser, a mixture of fleeting desperation and stubbornness. They hang on, this kind. They teach right to the end, on their deathbeds. They read a penultimate poem.

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