Новинки Флёр Йегги

Fleur Jaeggy is often noted for her terse and telegraphic style, which brews up a haunting paradox: despite a zero-at-the-bone baseline, her fiction is intensely moving. As April Bernard commented in Newsday, how work “could be so chilly and so passionate at the same time is a puzzle, but that icy-hot quality is only one of its distinctions.” Here, in her newest collection, I Am the Brother of XX —whether the stories involve famous writers (Calvino, Ingeborg Bachmann, Joseph Brodsky) or baronesses, thirteenth-century visionaries or tormented siblings raised in elite Swiss boarding schools—Jaeggy contrives to somehow stealthily possess your mind. Of the possessions a dead mother has left behind, Jaeggy notes that “the black plastic bags are tearing, a sinister sound, of membranes.” Jaeggy is a font of throwaway wisdom: “The sadness of others one should leave alone. It is a small garden, a fragile delicate Arcadia, one should not disturb it.” Her champagne gothic worlds are seething with quiet violence—and unforgettable.

A un certo punto di questi racconti si parla di una «calma violenta» – e subito si riconosce il timbro e il passo di una scrittrice per cui l’ossimoro è come l’aria che respira, quasi un segno di riconoscimento, fin dal titolo del suo romanzo più famoso, I beati anni del castigo. Del quale Iosif Brodskij scrisse: «Durata della lettura: circa quattro ore. Durata del ricordo, come per l’au­trice, il resto della vita». Non diverso l’ef­fetto di queste storie, talvolta di una brevità lancinante, talvolta dense come un romanzo. Mescolando all’estro fantastico frammenti di ricordi e apparizioni, amalgamati in uno stile dove domina quello che gli etologi chiamano Übersprung, «di­versione»: quello scarto laterale, apparentemente fuori contesto, che è un segreto ancora insondato del comportamento. E, come si mostra qui, della letteratura.

Вслед за романом «Счастливые несчастливые годы», о котором Иосиф Бродский сказал: «Читаешь четыре часа, а вспоминаешь всю жизнь», Флёр Йегги написала сборник рассказов «Страх небесный», удостоенный премии Альберто Моравиа. Это пронзительная книга, не похожая ни на какую другую – жестокая, чуткая, обнаженная. В ней семь историй, между которыми, если приглядеться, есть любопытные переклички. Йегги показывает изнанку человеческой души: с прямотой, от которой перехватывает дыхание, она пишет о чувствах и мыслях, в каких люди редко отдают себе отчет. А если и отдают, то с изумлением или с испугом спешат запрятать те чувства обратно в душу, да поглубже, набрасывая на них покров, сшитый из благопристойности.

Впервые в России выходит самый нашумевший роман современной швейцарской писательницы Флер Йегги. Это история девочки из состоятельной семьи, которая учится в частной школе. Замкнутую жизнь, без привычной раньше пестроты и веселья, воспринимает как трагедию. Но вот в школе появляется новая ученица, и острота и богатство возникших чувств делают эти годы незабываемыми.
Недаром Иосиф Бродский писал об этом романе: "Читаешь четыре часа, а вспоминаешь всю жизнь".

"Reading time is approximately four hours. Remembering time, as for its author, the rest of one's life," said Joseph Brodsky of Fleur Jaeggy's novel, Sweet Days of Displine. Now Jaeggy has come up with seven stories, each at some deep level in dark complicity with the others, all as terse and spare as if etched with a steel tip. A brooding atmosphere of horror, a disturbing and subversive propensity for delirium haunts the violent gestures and chilly irony of these tales. Full of menace, the air they breathe is stirred only by the Föhn, the warm west wind of the Alps that inclines otherwise respectable citizens to vent the spleen and angst of life's last vanities.

Delicately imbued with an unbalanced, maniacal quality and with nuances of emotion woven and unravelled simultaneously, [the fiction of] Fleur Jaeggy has an extraordinary ability to create character and atmosphere. -- World Literature Today

Fleur Jaeggy writes about despair with such precision that her words can seem almost gentle, as if unhappiness is to be caressed and admired, like a lover's body.... Jaeggy's skill lies less in storytelling than in observation and revelation. Even in the unsuccessful stories, Jaeggy's numinous desolation is so lovely and so exact that it is almost enough. -- The New York Review of Books, Cathleen Schine

Fleur Jaeggy's pen is an engraver's needle depicting roots, twigs, and branches of the tree of madness....Extraordinary prose. -- Joseph Brodsky

Hypnotic intensity...gripping, even haunting work: powerful and hard to shake off. -- The New York Review of Books

She has the enviable first glance for people and things, she harbors a mixture of distracted levity and authoritative wisdom. -- Ingeborg Bachmann

Set in postwar Switzerland, Fleur Jaeggy's eerily beautiful novel begins simply and innocently enough: "At fourteen I was a boarder in a school in the Appenzell." But there is nothing truly simple or innocent here. With the off-handed knowingness of a remorseless young Eve, the narrator describes life as a captive of the school and her designs to win the affections of the apparently perfect new girl, Frederique. As she broods over her schemes as well as on the nature of control and madness, the novel gathers a suspended, unsettling energy. Now translated into six languages, I Beati Anni del Castigo in its Italian original won the 1990 Premio Bagutta and the 1990 Premio Speciale Rapallo. In Tim Parks' consummate translation (with its "spare, haunting quality of a prose poem"), Sweet Days of Discipline was selected as one of the London Times Literary Supplement's Notable Books of 1992: "In a period when novels are generally over-blown and scarcely portable, it is good to be able to recommend [one that is] miraculously short and beautifully written."