Sweet Days of Discipline

by Fleur Jaeggy

Book Overview

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 Fr?derique, the apparently perfect new girl. In Tim Parks' consummate translation (with its...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0811229033
• ISBN13: 9780811229036
• Release Date: October 2019
• Publisher: New Directions Publishing Corporation
• Length: 112 Pages
• Weight: 0.30 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.4" x 5.1" x 7.8"

Customer Reviews

A gem

One of the all too rare examples of literature as art rather than entertainment, this book deserves to be much better known. Jeaggy is a master of style and has a purity and preciseness of language that makes this book an utter joy. A future classic.

Interesting exploration of emotional landscape

Sweet Days of Discipline is narrated by a boarding school student who has attended several such schools, who has been defiant, who is a disinterested student, who becomes nearly obsessed with a new student - disciplined, independent, nihilistic. The tension in the narrative derives from emotional states rather than plot events - yet the tension builds as clearly as in a thriller. This is achieved by the author's excellent understanding of her narrator's point of view and the use of landscape, daily events and memories to express that view. Examples: the description of the landscape on the narrator's early morning walk; the destruction of letters from her mother; the memory of her roommate's dance dress but not her name ...Not a perfect book but well worth the two or three hours it takes to read.

Remarkable prose.

It is a terrible thing that only two of Jaeggy's odd, spare, and brilliant works are presently available in English. This novella is striking in its stylistic genius and restrained but intense emotional world. I eagerly await the translation of more of Jaeggy's work.