Father and son circle the abyss of their late wife and mother, Thelma. His father, Reginald, lives in seclusion with an enigmatic servant, Lampe. (A dramatis personae is provided.) The novel concerns a man named Beeklam, a recluse who stocks the flooded basement of his Amsterdam villa with statues. It is a strange addition to Jaeggy’s canon of frozen miniatures, a brief and mesmeric work structured in part like a play. Instead, she is passed around like secret cargo among devotees who have come to rely on her exactingness, her black humour, and the clean, crystalline beauty of her prose.Īn early novel, The Water Statues (1980), has recently been published by New Directions, in a translation by Gini Alhadeff. Jaeggy is too severe and macabre for a Ferrante-like sensation and too good to fade into respectful obscurity. (The book had already established her reputation there.) Its recent reissue aligned with a vogue for short, elliptical fictions written by women, including rediscoveries like Elizabeth Hardwick’s Sleepless Nights (1979) and Renata Adler’s Pitch Dark (1983), and newer works by writers like Kate Zambreno, Sigrid Nunez, and Nathalie Léger. The writer and translator Tim Parks discovered her first masterpiece, Sweet Days of Discipline (1989), while browsing a bookstore in Italy in the early ‘90s. Her stock has lately risen in the Anglophone world. There she befriended the poet Ingeborg Bachmann, who sometimes appears in her stories, and married Roberto Calasso, the novelist and future editor of the prestigious publisher Adelphi Editions. Having completed her studies, she modelled in the United States before moving to Rome. (She would later translate Marcel Schwob and Thomas de Quincey into Italian, the language in which she writes.) Like several of her protagonists, she spent her adolescence at a Swiss boarding school. She grew up speaking German, French, and Italian. The implications of Jaeggy’s fictions are forever attempting to escape her control, like light around the edges of a collapsed star. But over the course of a four-decade career, it has also come to suggest its own repressed opposition. This austerity is a matter of profound artistry. The dedicated reader of Jaeggy feels something similar about the author. ‘She could even tidy the shelves of the void’, one of her characters says admiringly of another. But her restraint never falters the hoary crust remains inviolable. While reading a Jaeggy novel, one senses the dark sea roiling beneath the ice, the uncharted depths, entire phyla of creatures, great shelves of stone. Something is always held back, a force at odds with its own circumscription. Elements of the gothic mode are often present – suicide, terror, insanity – though scrupulously denied the fuel necessary for spectacle. The elegance of her prose disguises its lurid appeal. Her icy, rigorous fictions are naturally preserved in the manner of an alpine corpse. So let me say in all honesty, I wasn’t expecting much of the record Skepsis, the third album from deathcore pioneers Through the Eyes of the Dead.The Swiss writer Fleur Jaeggy practices an astringent minimalism. I don’t think breakdowns are interesting or heavy and their usage in metal has long been of serious frustration to me. I don’t listen to hardcore for several reasons and one of them is the breakdown. And partially this is due to my deep distaste for the breakdown as an institution in metal. Also, there are some production styles that were brought into the genre by “core” bands, particularly the drum sounds, that I really don’t like. I had some major issues with it partially just because labels started flooding their rosters with it, despite it not being that interesting. Honestly, it’s just been a style that I never really understood and that oftentimes felt like it wasn’t as straight-up metal as I wanted from my extreme metal. I have been admittedly absent when it comes to much of the deathcore & metalcore trend that has moved into metal in the last decade.
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