Els feliços anys del càstig

by Fleur Jaeggy, Xavier Lloveras (Translator)

Al Bausler Institut, un internat femení situat al cantó més retrògrad de Suïssa, l’Appenzell, s’hi respira una densa atmosfera de captiveri, sensualitat inconfessada i demència.

En aquests paratges pels quals passejava l’escriptor Robert Walser, i on es va suïcidar després d’estar-se trenta anys en un manicomi, s’hi desenvolupa la infància i l’adolescència de la protagonista pocs anys després de la Segona Guerra Mundial, que recorda aquelles etapes de la seva vida des de la maduresa.

En aquest col·legi imaginari que es manté, transfigurat, en la memòria, la narradora es veurà atreta irremeiablement per la Frédérique, la «nova»: bonica, severa, perfecta, una figura enigmàtica que sembla saber-ho tot de la vida, i que li deixa entreveure una cosa a la vegada serena i terrible.

L’estil lacònic i auster, delicadament punyent, i l’agudesa de les reflexions més subtils subratllen la intensitat d’aquesta història implacable. Entre el desconcert, l’atracció i el temor, una emoció insòlita trastoca el lector, com si es trobés al centre d’un jardí ben cuidat i de sobte s’hi originés un terratrèmol.

Genres: Fiction, Queer, Historical Fiction, Italian Literature, LGBT, Coming Of Age, Literary Fiction

108 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1989

About the author

Fleur Jaeggy is a Swiss author, who writes in Italian. The Times Literary Supplement named Proleterka as a Best Book of the Year upon its US publication, and her Sweet Days of Discipline won the Premio Bagutta and the Premio Speciale Rapallo. As of 2021, six of her books have been translated into English.

Reviews

[Vit Babenco · Rating 5 out of 5]

The boarding school for girls… The atmosphere is thick with despondency…

At fourteen I was a boarder in a school in the Appenzell. This was the area where Robert Walser used to take his many walks when he was in the mental hospital in Herisau, not far from our college. He died in the snow. Photographs show his footprints and the position of his body in the snow. We didn’t know the writer. And nor did our literature teacher.

The girl is lonely and neglected… A new remarkable boarder arrives… The girl wishes to conquer her friendship… At last she manages…

Frédérique is not well loved; but she is respected. She hardly ever talks at table, and after lessons, if she’s not on her own, she’s with me. It’s ridiculous for me to be sleeping in the house with the younger girls. It’s the house for those who aren’t considered adult, even if they only miss it by a few months. We are young up to fifteen.

The girl remembers other schools… She had already been a prisoner of different boarding schools for seven years… She is desperate and distressed… She is disappointed in everything… Her voice remains bitter and disdainful all the way through…

Frédérique gave me the impression, and I know this word makes people smile, of being a nihilist. This made her all the more intriguing to me. A nihilist with no passion, with her gratuitous laugh, a gallows laugh. I had already heard the word at home, one holiday, spoken with scorn. When Frédérique drew me into that kind of conversation, which in any event I admired, there was an atmosphere of punishment, an absence of lightness, she was not frivolous. Her face was as though honed, the flesh covering the bones became sharp. I thought of her as of a sickle moon in an oriental sky. While the people sleep she cuts off their heads. She was eloquent. She didn’t talk about justice. Nor about good and evil, concepts I had heard from teachers and fellow boarders ever since I set foot in my first school at eight years old.

Those, whose childhood and adolescence were ruined, become full of bitterness for life.

[Orsodimondo · Rating 4 out of 5]

OGNI COSA È SEMPRE QUALCOS’ALTRO



Cercavo la solitudine e forse l’assoluto. Ma invidiavo il mondo.

Viene da definirla chirurgica la scrittura di Fleur Jaeggy per quanto è precisa e perché incide come un bisturi. E sembra andare a fondo anche quando rimane in superficie. “Concisa come un epitaffio.”
(Poi, certo, scrittura-chirurgica è definizione abusata, come atmosfera-kafkiana.)
Taglia scrivendo, questo io-narrante che non si dà mai un nome, non dimostra la sua età, e si racconta quindicenne selvaggia, fredda, scostante, forse anche ribelle, in un collegio svizzero femminile circondato da boschi e montagne, nel secondo dopoguerra. Un istituto dove anche il personale è essenzialmente femminile.

Per me è impossibile non pensare a un altro collegio femminile, secluso e recluso, in quella storia ambientata qualche decennio prima, inizio secolo, o forse invece fin-de-siècle, dal titolo misterioso di Mine-Haha (ovvero dell’educazione fisica delle fanciulle).



Frédérique arriva al collegio e diventa protagonista col suo vivere ritirata, isolata, a parte la compagnia dell’io-narrante, coi suoi eloquenti silenzi, con la sua bella fronte alta, dove i pensieri si potevano toccare, dove generazioni passate le avevano tramandato talento, intelligenza, fascino. Per l’io-narrante – probabile, almeno in parte, alter ego della stessa Jaeggy – Frédérique diventa un modello e una vetta da conquistare al punto da imparare a imitarne la grafia. Ma non per questo rinuncia alle sue passeggiate solitarie mattutine, a svegliarsi alle cinque.
Frédérique tornerà in due brevi apparizioni anche dopo i “beati anni” dei collegi, solo che ormai è ospite del manicomio da vent’anni e se continuava così avrebbe preso la via del cimitero. Un po’ quanto successo a Robert Walser, nominato nell’incipit, anche lui ospite del manicomio, ritrovato morto nella neve a interrompere una delle sue eterne passeggiate.



Più che seguire un arco temporale, il racconto della Jaeggy avanza per analogia anziché cronologia, il presente e l’imperfetto si mischiano e incrociano. Così come la scrittura sembra costruita sul contrasto e l’opposizione: di conseguenza, il colore del fuoco è celestiale, qualcuno è abissalmente cortese, la dolcezza ha la stessa intensità della collera, Paradiso e Aurora sono nomi violenti, la vivacità è spossata, qualcuno è appassionatamente timido, la vendetta è esaudita, l’innocenza è rude e pedante, l’allegria può diventare tetra, l’allegria è difficile da sopportare, “vetusta è l’infanzia”…
Pensavo agli opposti che si toccano, a una sorta di gioco fra i contrari, che diventa una simbiosi.
In fondo, l’io-narrante, come già detto, ha carattere ribelle e selvaggio.


Come sulla copertina, interni con donna di spalle opere di Vilhelm Hammershøi.

[Guille · Rating 5 out of 5]

“Buscaba la soledad y tal vez el absoluto. Pero envidiaba el mundo”

Robert Walser murió sepultado en la nieve mientras paseaba cerca de Appenzell, donde Fleur Jaeggy sitúa el internado para señoritas en el que cursó estudios a la edad de catorce años. La autora lo menciona al iniciar su relato, lo que coloca al autor suizo y, más concretamente, a su obra «Jakob von Gunten», en la mente del lector desde los primeros pasajes de la novela. En la obra de Walser, Jakob se interna voluntariamente en el Instituto Benjamenta, supuestamente con la intención de doblegar su orgullo y arrogancia e internalizar la subordinación como valor supremo, virtudes muy valoradas para una perfecta ama de casa, objetivo de maman para con su hija Jaeggy. No es la única coincidencia, el estilo de la autora recuerda mucho al de Walser, su elegancia, su belleza, su sobriedad, sus sugerentes vacíos, su cripticismo también (“¿En qué piensan las chicas? Al menos la mitad tiene la nostalgia de morir y de un templo y de todos esos vestidos”). Pero Jaeggy es más cruel, más fría, más perturbadora.

“… perseveraba en el placer de llegar hasta el fondo de la tristeza, como en un despecho. El placer del desasosiego. No me resultaba nuevo. Lo apreciaba desde que tenía ocho años, interna en el primer colegio, religioso. Y pensaba que a lo mejor habían sido los años más bellos. Los años del castigo.”

La vida en un internado siempre me ha parecido algo inquietante, malsano. Seguramente influido por películas y novelas, siempre he visto algo turbio en las relaciones que se establecen en ese espacio cerrado y alejado del mundo entre los alumnos y entre estos y sus profesores (“… si cada noche besé la mano de mère préfete, sin rebelarme jamás, es porque a veces, más allá de todas las reglas, tuve la voluptuosidad de hacerlo. La voluptuosidad de la obediencia”). Obviamente, esta novela no será la que me cure de tal prejuicio. Todo el relato tiene una atmósfera de opresión, de rabia contenida que rodea a los pocos personajes que destaca la autora y narradora y que, con maledicente perversidad, describe: “la negrita”, la muñequita hija de un mandatario africano a la que todos admiran pero a la que nadie se acerca; su compañera de habitación, una alemana sana y corpulenta “aplicada y mala, como pueden serlo las chicas estúpidas”; Marion, la niña a la que no aceptó como su protegida, algo así como su esclava o su sirvienta; Micheline, la niñita de daddy, con una belleza que “paseaba como un pájaro tropical” y que solo aspira a pasárselo bien (“La alegría es difícil de soportar”); la directora del colegio, la señora Hofstetter, “alta, maciza, llena de dignidad, con la sonrisa hundida en la gordura”.

“En cierta manera hay una fisonomía de morgue en los rostros de las maestras. O cierto tufillo a morgue aun en las más joven y agradable de las muchachas. Una doble imagen, anatómica y antigua. En una, corre y ríe, y en la otra yace en una cama, cubierta por un sudario de encaje. Su misma piel la ha bordado.”

Y, por supuesto, la principal, Frédérique, su admirada amiga, la única que le parece interesante entre todos los habitantes de tan vetusta institución, tan respetuosa y obediente con la autoridad como despreciativa con sus compañeras y su entorno. Los cuadernos siempre ordenados en su ordenada habitación con armarios ordenados en los que guarda la “lencería doblada como los paños sagrados, los pensamientos doblados también”. Frédérique tiene algo de lo que las demás carecen, quizás producto de una vieja y noble estirpe, “como un don de los muertos”.

“Hay algo absoluto e inaprensible en ciertos seres, parece una lejanía del mundo, de los vivos, pero también parece el signo del que sufre un poder que no conocemos.”

No hay trama en la novela, solo escenas, imágenes, reflexiones que hay que leer sin prisa, pensando y repensando cada frase (no se preocupen, la novela apenas supera las cien páginas de letra grande) hasta sacar a la luz toda la profundidad que encierra cada una de ellas, cada párrafo. No siempre es fácil asimilar sus contradictorias expresiones, desentrañar la densidad de lo leído, pese a la sencillez de su construcción, a la simplicidad de su sintaxis.

“Yo comprendía a esos niños que se arrojaban desde el último piso de un colegio para hacer algo fuera del orden.”

P.S. Siendo todo bastante perturbador, lo que más me ha afectado es comprobar que fui alguien que solo le dio dos estrellas en mi primera y juvenil lectura.

[Kris · Rating 5 out of 5]

"Farewells have distant ancestors and the hills and fields cover them with chaff and dust."

In crystalline prose, Fleur Jaeggy presents the story of a narrator looking back on her life as a 14-year-old girl living in a school in the Appenzell. This is no standard bildungsroman, however, as Jaeggy shows in her opening paragraph,

"This was the area where Robert Walser used to take his many walks when he was in the mental hospital in Herisau, not far from our college. He died in the snow. Photographs show his footprints and the position of his body in the snow. We didn't know the writer. And nor did our literature teacher. Sometimes I think it might be nice to die like that, after a walk, to let yourself drop into a natural grave in the snows of the Appenzell, after almost thirty years of mental hospital, in Herisau."

The narrator's memories center around images of constraint and discipline, set against failed attempts for freedom. These extremes are represented by two girls between whom the narrator was torn: Frédérique, a nihilist who represents perfect control and obedience, and Micheline, a cheerful extrovert whose dreams for the future revolved around "movement, confusion, applause and Daddy." Jaeggy's economical use of language produces arresting images. Describing her first visit with Micheline in her room, the narrator remembers, "She immediately showed me all her clothes. It was as if the sun shone out of her cupboards." Frédérique poses quite a contrast, "It was as though she talked about nothing, Her words flew. What was left after them had no wings. She never said the word God and I can barely write it down myself when I think of the silence she surrounded it with."

Jaeggy's prose has a hypnotic, almost hallucinatory effect, creating a sense of time spiraling and circling, as adolescence is revealed as anything but innocent, the line between discipline and madness is blurred, and the passage of time does nothing to bring the characters any closer to freedom.

[Warwick · Rating 4 out of 5]

An inscrutable little novel. This is one of those books that begins, goes along for a while, and then ends, and you think…okay. That happened. There's not much of what you might call plot, but Jaeggy's clean prose, gnomic aphorisms, and increasingly turbulent atmosphere combine to make it all feel intense, powerful.

‘At fourteen I was a boarder at a school in the Appenzell,’ the book begins simply. On the next page, a new girl arrives at the school, for whom the narrator feels a conflicted attraction; and that's it – the setting and plot are now done. From then on, the book moves forward purely from the interplay of these existing elements.

The writing is, as I said, very clean: reading Jaeggy's sentences, you feel like you're breathing in the Swiss air yourself (I literally am, because I live here, but you know what I mean). Everything is spare, fresh, pared-back. Brief observations are pursued until they crystallise into epigrams: ‘There is no time, at that time,’ she begins, talking about youth, and then rephrases – ‘Childhood is ancient.’ Or again, noting the fact that ‘a new leader will hate the predecessors' favourites’, she concludes, remarkably, ‘A boarding school is like a harem.’ Everywhere there is this tendency to distil simple thoughts down to something axiomatic and remarkable. And funny, too:

In the Appenzell I recall some ancient men, cripples, a cake shop and a fountain. If you wanted a bit of city life you went to the cake shop; there was never anybody there, but an old man might pass by along the road.

(Big city life, me try fi get by.) There is a lot in here that calls back to a Swiss literary context: the school itself, the Bausler Institute, recalls the Benjamenta Institute in Robert Walser's Jakob von Gunten, and Walser is evoked in person on the first page for good measure. But the book also, in its insular Alpine setting, brings to mind The Magic Mountain, retold from a female perspective in a tenth of the space. Jaeggy's narrator even describes the boarding school as ‘an Arcadia of sickness’, and, as in Mann, the emotions at play are only highlighted by the healthy, idyllic environment. ‘Can one feel disorientated in an idyll?’ Jaeggy wonders (a question that haunts Swiss literature).

Nothing ever really happens between our narrator and Frédérique, the object of her fascination, and one wonders why; one also wonders why the book has the title that it does. Eventually you realise that these two questions are circling around the same thing. The book can be read on a psychological level as having something to do with sexual power-play, the obscure satisfactions of dominance and submission:

The pleasure that comes from obedience. Order and submission, you can never know what fruits they will bear in adulthood.

In a way, this book is like a version of Violette Leduc's Thérèse et Isabelle in which the sex has all been sublimated into something much more complicated. Cocteau's Les Enfants terribles also comes to mind, not least for the way in which minor characters increasingly end up being written off: despite the wholesome surroundings, we start to feel the pressure of mortality around the margins of the story, a debilitating illness here, a car crash there, then a suicide…almost as though the protagonists' state of mind has begun to affect things out there, in what we have to assume is still the real world…

And of course, as with any book that compels you to reference a hundred others, it's not really like any of them – it's only like itself, compact and unique. The translation from Tim Parks is also fab – you can see his care and attention right from the title, which switches ‘years’ for ‘days’ in order to replace the assonance of anni del castigo with the alliteration of Days of Discipline. It's the kind of attentive sensitivity that this strange book seems to demand, and which it deserves to get.

[julieta · Rating 5 out of 5]

Me quedo deslumbrada por esta novela. ¿Cómo describirla? Tiene exactitud, tensión, belleza. Te mete en un ritmo propio, lleno de imágenes evocadoras, te puedes imaginar todo como en cámara lenta. Había leído otro libro de FJ que me había parecido muy duro, no que este me lo parezca menos. Pero es hermoso. Tiene una dureza que es pura belleza. Una historia de chicas en un internado, quizás sea eso, que hay como una juventud triste, que lo hace muy bello. Y con pocos trazos te pinta algo inolvidable. Y traducido por Juana Bignozzi, poeta argentina maravillosa. Muy recomendado.

[Paul · Rating 4 out of 5]

A fairly short novella set in Switzerland in the 1950s, it begins in a straightforward way: “At fourteen I was a boarder in a school in the Appenzell.” The reader may be tempted to think this is going to be yet another analysis of teenage adolescence and in some ways it is as Jaeggy writes this in a semi-autobiographical way. Brodsky makes the point that:
“Dipped in the blue ink of adolescence, Fleur Jaeggy’s pen is an engraver’s needle depicting roots, twigs, and branches of the tree of madness, growing in the splendid isolation of the small Swiss garden of knowledge into full leaf until it obscures every perspective.”
There are lots of literary references: Walser is invoked on the first page and of course he died in the snow in Appenzell in 1956. The mountain setting are suggestive of TB and Mann’s The Magic Mountain. There are Bronte references and suggestions of Jane Eyre’s boarding school. The plot is a simple description of life in the school and the narrator’s friendships. These are contrasting. There is Frederique, something of an austere relationship with some distance and coldness, yet very profound. Then there is Micheline, more open and spontaneous: “What Micheline wanted from life was to have a good time, and wasn’t that what I wanted too?” The contrast between Frederique and Micheline is central to the book. The narrator encounters Frederique later in life living in austerity:
“I thought of this destitution of hers as some spiritual or aesthetic exercise. Only an aesthete can give up everything. I wasn’t surprised so much by her poverty as by her grandeur. That room was a concept. Though of what I didn’t know. Once again she had gone beyond me.”
The austerity is a reflection of their austere relationship. One of the marvels of this book is that Jaeggy manages to write about the hothouse world of a boarding school in such a cold and austere way. There is a gothic quality to this and the award winning translation is excellent. Reviewers who have attended boarding schools have noted how well Jaeggy has captured the crushes (passiones), the rituals and teachers having favourites. The head of school Frau Hofstetter is reminiscent of Mme Beck in Villette.
Jaeggy writes well and turns a good phrase. School lockers are described as “the dear little mortuary of our thoughts”. Boarding schools: “A boarding school is a strong institution, since in a sense it is founded on blackmail.”
The language is often that of mental illness and there are plenty of premonitions and death and all that surrounds it are ever present. There is the sense that we are all dying, even as children, evoking Rilke who said that we carry our deaths within us. The narrative is intense and claustrophobic and there are gaps which the reader has to fill and mercifully there is no whiney teenage angst.
It is a brief and sparely written novella and there is more to it than meets the eye.

[luce (cry bebè's back from hiatus) · Rating 5 out of 5]

❀ blog ❀ thestorygraph ❀ letterboxd ❀ tumblr ❀ ko-fi ❀

Sweet Days of Discipline is a slim dagger of a novel.

Written in a prose so sharp it will cut you, Sweet Days of Discipline is a work of startling and enigmatic beauty, a study in contradictions: order and chaos, sublimity and abjection, clarity and obfuscation, illusion and reality.

Fleur Jaeggy is in absolute command of her craft so that not a word is wasted or out-of-place. Jaeggy exercises formidable control over her language, which is restrained to the point of severity. By turns glacial and melancholic, Jaeggy’s epigrammatic style is dauntingly ascetic. Yet, her direct and crisp prose belies the complexity of her subject. I struggle to pinpoint what this book is even about. Our narrator is consumed by desire but the way she expresses and articulates said desire is certainly atypical. Even upon a second reading, I find myself enthralled by her mysterious and perplexing relationship with Frédérique. Ultimately, it is the obscure nature of their bond that makes me all the more eager to revisit this novel once more.

Our unnamed narrator's recounting of her schooldays is pervaded by a dream-like quality. Torpor seems to reign supreme at Bausler Institut, an all-girls boarding school in the Appenzell. While the girls’ days are in fact dictated by routine, a sense of idleness prevails. Our narrator, who has spent most of her youth in boarding school, coldly observes the people around her. Her detachment and contempt towards her peers and the rarefied world she’s part of perfectly complement the staccato rhythm of Jaeggy’s prose. When Frédérique is enrolled in her school, she finds herself captivated by her. Her infatuation with Frédérique however doesn’t lead to happiness. Our narrator wants to best Frédérique, to ‘conquer’ her. She is both in awe and jealous of Frédérique’s apathy towards the students, the teachers, and their surroundings. The two eventually begin spending time together but our narrator cannot or is unwilling to express her feelings.
What follows is a taut tale of juxtaposition. The orderly world of the school is contrasted with the inner turmoil of youth. The narrator’s clipped commentary is at once hyperreal and unearthly. While the narrator does try to control her feelings, she’s at times overcome by their sheer intensity. Her love for Frédérique is also inexorably entwined with hatred, as she finds the idea of being bested, of being under anyone’s thumb, unbearable. Our narrator is unforgiving in her detailed recollection, her harshness and cruelty did at times take me by surprise. Yet, her longing for Frédérique and her unwillingness to bend for that love made her into a compelling character. As the narrative progresses she and Frédérique begin to lose sight of one another, and as adolescence gives way to adulthood one of them spirals out of control.
The English translation is superb. I’ve read this both in the original Italian and in English and I have to say that I don’t prefer one over the other. If anything Tim Parks, the translator, got rid of some rather outdated and insensitive terms in the original. The prose in the Italian version is also, to my ears at least, even more, stringent and stark than its English counterpart (maybe this is due to a combination of the slightly old-fashioned italian + my being so used to reading in english that books in italian will inevitably make for a more exacting reading experience).

Sweet Days of Discipline makes for a lethal read. Jaeggy’s austere prose is a study in perfectionism. Yet, despite her unyielding language and her aloof, occasionally menacing, narrator, Sweet Days of Discipline is by no means a boring or emotionless read. The intensity of our narrator’s, often unexpressed, feelings and desires result in a thrilling and evocative read.

[Declan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Several years ago I walked around the grounds and gardens of Kylmore Abbey which at the time was a boarding school.





At one point, at a spot close to the lake I found a 5 euro note. As there was nobody else around, except my companion, I pocketed the money and said that when we went to my favourite bookshop Charlie Byrne's Bookshop in Galway, I would buy a book set in a boarding. There are always surprises in Charlie Byrne's but even allowing for that, I didn't really expect to find to find a book that matched my requirements so well, a novel published by New Directions which begins:

"At fourteen I was a boarder in a school in the Appenzell. This was the area where Robert Walser used to take his many walks when he was in the mental hospital in Herisau, not far from our college."

I bought the book of course,a remaindered copy and used that fiver to pay for it. I was more than pleased to find that the book was as coolly precise in its observations as the work of W.G. Sebald. Its subject matter was quite unlike his being a first-person recounting of the narrator Eve's fascination with another girl called Frédérique and the ways in which a particular context, in this case, the boarding school, can lend support to fantasies and self-delusions which are exposed and destroyed when those accommodating conditions change. The end of school is the beginning of adulthood. The beginning of adulthood is the end of rapture.

Jaeggy's writing style is spare and simple but manages to support a great weight of ideas and of melancholy. The optimism and infatuation of a fourteen-year-old girl shouldn't have to be crushed and denied. But that is how it so often is, here, and in life.

[Marc Lamot · Rating 3 out of 5]

For starters: let it be clear that the title of this booklet (“Sweet days”) is meant to be sarcastic. A woman looks back on her childhood, which she spent in different boarding schools in Switserland, a chilling story of suppressed feelings, coldness and gloom. On the surface, this seems like a rather classic coming-of-age novel, with all the usual ingredients of the stifling, over-disciplined life at a boarding school in Switzerland in the 1950s. But the reference, at the very beginning to Robert Walser is not an innocent link. That Swiss writer was the master of stories in which apparently nothing much happens, but which are imbued with the gravity and chillness of life, written in accurate, almost merciless prose.

And that is also the case with his compatriot Fleur Jaeggy. For instance, the absent mother (who steers her daughter's life all the way from Brazil), and the cold, distant father who lives in hotel rooms, make clear that the unnamed narrative voice has been left to her own fate. She seeks rapprochement with two other girls, one mysterious and detached, the other exuberantly extravert, with a clear but suppressed sexual undertone, but that also leads to not much. There is a veil of gloom over the entire story, which also regularly contains references to death. Again, as with Walser, not much is happening, but it is mainly the intense, sombre atmosphere that makes this short booklet stand out; it's difficult to put your finger on it, but Jeaggy has a way of writing that sticks, that’s for certain.

[Adam Dalva · Rating 4 out of 5]

Interesting, hazy novella of a girlhood spent in boarding schools, of a crush that travels in surprising directions. Jaeggy is a great writer and I flew through this, taking special joy in the moments outside the lean narrative of the year in the Appenzell. One moment in particular, a scene in a cold room toward the end of the book, will stick with me. It is an oddly repetitive book for something so short (one recurring description of nighttime dancing became frustrating), and the moments of surreality may have done more harm than good. At its best, it's a sort of micro Magic Mountain, and though it never quite came together for me, I'm happy to have read it.

[Meike · Rating 3 out of 5]

In her autofictional novella, Swiss writer Jaeggy (*1940) ponders her time as a teenager in a boarding school, here set in Appenzell. The all-girls institute appears as a surreal place that locks the boarders away from life, keeping them from a achieving a bildung in the sense of the bildungsroman, so a sense of self in society. Rather, a pointless demand for obedience structures this education, and a feeling of suffocation lurks in every line: While the narrator's enigmatic father (who becomes important in Proleterka) is mainly absent, the mother directs from Brazil how the daughter should live and what she should study.

The German roommate seems to exist in her own kind of hell, but the narrator's resentment rooted in the fact that the mother insisted on her living with a German is so big that the two girls can't emotionally reach each other, they remain alone together. And then there's Frédérique: The narrator develops a crush on the girl, but her admiration leads nowhere, there is no knowledge regarding the expression of emotion. The same goes for the new girl everybody is fascinated by. The effects of a life full of stifled curiosity and repressed feeling are represented in the married couple running the institution.

Jaeggy delivers the story in her signature crisp sentences and adds a haunting atmosphere, but after I Am the Brother of XX, I was disappointed by this novella: It's too long for what it is, and I was a little bored.

[Hank1972 · Rating 4 out of 5]

Queste due ragazze non si dimenticano

Una scrittura essenziale, calibratissima, a volte delicata a volte puntuta. Come una canzone di Battiato. Di cui, in effetti, FJ ha scritto molti testi.

Con questi parchi mezzi e in poche pagine si crea un piccolo mondo, di montagne e collegi svizzeri, di suore dominanti, di famiglie benestanti e rapporti familiari complicati. E quelle due ragazze, così diverse, la cui amicizia/amore attraverserà il tempo e la vita, e il tempo e la vita, come sempre, ribalteranno tutto.


Ed ecco Frédérique. Si siede. Il suo viso è vicino al mio. Ci guardiamo. È un sortilegio che unisce gli amanti?

Ma perseveravo nel piacere dell’andare in fondo alla tristezza, come a un dispetto. Il piacere del disappunto. Non mi era nuovo. Lo apprezzavo da quando avevo otto anni, interna nel primo collegio, religioso. E forse furono gli anni più belli, pensavo. Gli anni del castigo. Vi è come un’esaltazione, leggera ma costante, negli anni del castigo, nei beati anni del castigo.

[Jonathan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Lovely. Crisp, evocative and beautifully controlled prose. Set aside a couple of hours, make a cup of tea, cover your legs in a blanket, put on the fire and devour this in a single bite.

[Laura Gotti · Rating 4 out of 5]

In realtà è una rilettura e per fortuna l'ho riletto. La prima volta, quasi vent'anni fa, mi era piaciuto ma non avevo apprezzato. A questo giro l'ho veramente molto amato, a partire dalla strepitosa scrittura della Jaeggy: scarna, essenziale, diretta, precisa e tagliente. Sono ancora che penso alla descrizione dei corvi, che nella sua penna sono vanagloriosi. Che meraviglia. Ho riletto quella frase più e più volte per la tanta perfezione contenuta. È poco più di un racconto lungo, letto in un pomeriggio caldo di inizio estate (sì dai è estate) e chiuso verso l'ora dell'aperitivo giusto in tempo per brindare alla riscoperte. Pendeva lì dalla mia libreria, quasi a chiamarmi, quella copertina azzurro pallido e nessuna annotazione al suo interno - strano - e l'ho ripreso in mano e ho fatto bene.

Ogni tanto faccio le scelte giuste.

[Celeste Corrêa · Rating 4 out of 5]

«Aos catorze anos, eu era aluna interna num colégio do Appenzell. Região onde Robert Walser deu muitos passeios quando estava no manicómio, em Herisau, não longe do nosso instituto. Morreu na neve.»

Gostei embora não esteja certa de ter compreendido o livro - ou não quis - ambientado num colégio interno suiço na década de 50 do século passado; durante a leitura, lembrei-me da Montanha Mágica associando o topo e o sopé com este colégio de amizades surpreendentes, solidão, recato e, para algumas internas, inveja do mundo exterior visto das janelas.

Será que a ida para um colégio interno com uma educação de qualidade mas longe da família trará vantagens para a vida adulta? Ou criará crianças e adolescentes vetustos?

«Na juventude abriga-se o retrato da velhice, e na alegria, a prostração, como em alguns recém-nascidos onde se parece reconhecer o velho que acabou de deixar a vida.»

Fleur Jaeggy mergulha na memória e escreve um livro com um título que me despertou curiosidade e estranheza. Felizes e castigo parecem incompatíveis.

«O prazer do desapontamento. Não me era novo. Apreciava-o desde que tinha oito anos e era aluna interna no primeiro colégio, religioso. E se calhar foram os melhores anos, pensava. Os anos de castigo. Há como que uma exaltação, ligeira mas constante, nos anos de castigo, nos felizes anos de castigo.»

[...]

«A alegria pela dor é maliciosa, tem veneno. É uma vingança. Não é tão angélica como a dor.»

[BookMonkey · Rating 4 out of 5]

Rating: 4.25🍌

Despite not being widely read in the US, the Swiss writer Robert Walser was an enormous influence on major literary figures such as Franz Kafka, Walter Benjamin, and WG Sebald. Walser suffered from mental illness throughout his life; he spent most of the last three decades of his life in Swiss mental institutions, where he wrote and took long walks through the mountains. In 1956 he was found dead after suffering a heart attack on one of these walks in the canton of Appenzell, leaving behind dozens of stories, novels, and plays whose narrators, according to a New Yorker essay by Ben Lerner, "are always praising obedience and punishment."

Walser looms heavily over Fleur Jaeggy's SWEET DAYS OF DISCIPLINE, a slim novella of boarding-school life translated into English from the Italian by Tim Parks in 1992. Indeed, Walser is mentioned on the first page, when Jaeggy's narrator tells us that the girls' boarding school she attended was located in Appenzell, very near where Walser "died in the snow." Like Walser, Jaeggy's narrator enjoys taking long walks through the surrounding mountains, early in the morning before the other girls are awake; like Walser's narrators, Jaeggy's narrator in SWEET DAYS OF DISCIPLINE is obsessed with obedience, submission, and, of course, discipline, the operating principle of the boarding school that serves as the setting for the novella.

Told in a retrospective, prismatic style tinged with melancholy, the plot, such as it is, revolves around the unnamed narrator recalling her boarding school days and the intense friendship she forged with Frédérique, an austere French girl with almost preternatural discipline. Frédérique folds her plain clothes with eerie precision; she plays the piano beautifully; she follows the rules exquisitely and displays virtually no human emotion. The narrator, who hates boarding school and can't wait to get out to begin her "real life," is attracted to Frédérique's ascetic nature and embarks on a friendship that she describes as an attempted (but unsuccessful) “conquest.”

The intense dynamic with Frédérique consumes the narrator until a new girl, Micheline, arrives at the school. Micheline wears colorful clothes and is carefree, nearly sybaritic -- the opposite of Frédérique in every way. Frustrated by her inability to “conquer” Frédérique, the narrator drops her for Micheline; soon after, Frédérique's father dies and she is taken out of school. The narrator spends the rest of her life regretting having ended their friendship.

Meanwhile, death lurks everywhere in the novella -- even in the cloistered world of these privileged boarding-school girls: "there is a mortuary look somehow to the faces of the boarders, a faint mortuary smell even to the youngest and most attractive girls.” And in the pretty shops and cottages of town, "if you look at the small white-framed windows and the busy, fiery flowers on the sills, you get this sense of tropical stagnation, a thwarted luxuriance, you have the feeling that inside something serenely gloomy and a little sick is going on. It’s an Arcadia of sickness. Inside, it seems, in the brightness in there, is the peace and perfection of death."

And yet there is a current of nostalgia that runs through the narrator's recollection of that severe era in her life. Despite detesting her boarding-school life, despite her impatience to get out and begin her real life, she discovers that, years later, she misses the regulation of the school bell and the disciplinary structures against which she defined her self and her dreams. Then again, nostalgia is a kind of death, too, isn't it?

[el · Rating 5 out of 5]

loved this from start to finish. sweet days of discipline is a strange, mesmeric little book about girlhood, class, and desire—its grotesqueries included—from the vantage point of a remote boarding school filled with hypnotically off-kilter young girls. more peripherally, peculiar adults loom, but the effect is charlie brown-like in that their portraits are incomplete, almost blurry, while the more tyrannical, ego-bound little girls take center stage.

the book is brief and best described by kaitlin philips in her 4columns review as "bourgeois sterility."

and of the very best quality! the english translation was riveting! i loved all its irregularities, the strangeness of the syntax choices, the weird ruptures in rhythm and meaning. i don't know how much of that is brought over from the original italian versus tim parks' having fun with his translation work, but it won me over completely.

kaitlin philips also makes an excellent point about the economy of language:

If the book were longer I’d have to admit its flaws: repetitions (meant, perhaps, to mirror a disturbed mind), further culs de sac in the plot, some rather high-handed metaphors. But clocking in at a sharp 101 pages, you’re finished before you can lodge a complaint, its contents going down as smoothly as a martini served in an ice-cold glass. How else to describe this writing: “She had been the most disciplined, respectful, ordered, perfect girl, it almost made your flesh creep . . . She could even tidy the shelves of the void.”

the shelves of the void!!!! so lovely!!!!

some other off-beat favorites from the book:

Frédérique sleeps on her own, with her cupboard in order, her underwear folded like altar cloths, her thoughts folded too, in their nightly starch.

—

I understood those children who jump from the top floor of a school simply to do something disordered, and I told her. Order was like ideas, something you possessed, something that possessed you. I would have liked to have met her father, but he died.

—

She orders, I obey, she steers me through the terms, it's all written in letters and stamps, bells with no sound. Dispatches.

—

Up on the hill I was in a state you might describe as 'ill-happiness.' A state that required solitude, a state of exhilaration and quiet selfishness, a cheerful vendetta. I had the impression that this exhilaration was an initiation, that the sickness in the happiness was due to a magical novitiate, a rite. Then it went wrong. I didn't feel anything particular any more. Every landscape constructed its own niche and shut itself away there.

—

Her red hair was magnificent, a prey, it looked photographed.

so weird! so uncanny!!! so slowing!!!! i love love love all of jaeggy's physical descriptions and her attention to the ways gesture and emotion tie in to each other. if i had any technical issues with the book, i've forgotten them now, or they're outweighed by the atmospheric drift of the narrative whole.

[Teresa · Rating 4 out of 5]

An unnamed narrator of at least forty years of age looks back on her life as a boarder at several different schools post-WWII. She’s been a boarder from the ages of eight (an age when time seems never-ending, the narrator says) through seventeen. There’s particular emphasis on the year she’s fifteen, a year she’s kept with the younger girls at the instruction of her unseen mother.

Not much happens in the novella. The narrator’s focus is on a few of the other boarders, girls of different nationalities; and a few adults, the female heads of the schools and a few parents, fathers for the most part. The title is certainly ironic, as though the narrator mentions the value of submission and obedience, she is not a rules-follower and it is obvious she is deeply unhappy.

For such a short work, some of the narration in the beginning may seem repetitive and certainly circuitous, but I can pinpoint the moment it started to deepen, and get even darker, though not much seems to change in the telling. Is this an extended metaphor for long-term prisoners, the unseen mother writing letters from Brazil a dictator? More likely it’s ‘just’ itself: a sad commentary on what the lack of love, home, and family can do to an institutionalized person (even one living at a hotel (another sterile institution) with her father in the summers), and how that lack warps an individual for the rest of her life.

[Alexander Carmele · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fesselnd und stimmig, gegen Ende aber etwas ziellos lose gestrickt.

Inhalt: 4/5 Sterne (mumienhaftes Aufwachsen „höherer“ Töchter)
Form: 5/5 Sterne (präzise, abwechslungsreich, stimmig)
Erzählstimme: 5/5 Sterne (Ich-Erzählerin, retrospektiv, nüchtern)
Komposition: 2/5 Sterne (längerer Text, etwas ziellos)
Leseerlebnis: 4/5 Sterne (atmosphärisch, immersiv)


Fleur Jaeggy, geboren 1940, schreibt in der Tradition von Ingeborg Bachmann und Clarice Lispector. Mit Die seligen Jahre der Züchtigung stellt sie sich zudem neben anderen Coming-of-Age-Romanen wie Robert Musils Die Verwirrungen des Zöglings Törleß und Robert Walsers Jakob von Gunten , die das Leben von Jugendlichen in Erziehungsanstalten bearbeiten. Bei Jaeggy geht es um das Appenzeller Bausler-Institut der 1950-60er:

Ich suchte die Einsamkeit und vielleicht das Absolute. Aber ich war neidisch auf die Welt. Es war eines Tages während des Mittagessens. Wir saßen alle auf unseren Plätzen. Ein Mädchen erschien, eine Neue. Sie war fünfzehn, ihre Haare waren so glatt und glänzend wie Klingen und ihre Augen streng, starr, beschattet. Die Nase war scharf und gebogen, und ihre Zähne, wenn sie lachte – und sie lachte wenig -, waren spitz.

Das Mädchen heißt Frédérique, und sie wird eine Art Mythos für die Ich-Erzählerin, die sich hingezogen und zugleich abgestoßen von ihr fühlt. Mythos wird sie, weil in Frédérique ein gefährliches Freiheitsversprechen existiert, das aus der Enge der Rollenbilder, der Erwartungshorizonte führt, aber deshalb auch ins Unbekannte, Leere und noch Unerforschte:

Ich befinde mich in einem in die Leere gemeißelten Zimmer. Ich spüre die Eiseskälte. Es ist ein Rechteck mit einem Fenster am Ende und vergilbten Wänden. »J’habite ici.« Ich stand im Raum. [Frédérique] nahm einen Topf, schüttete Spiritus hinein und zündete ihn an. Wir blieben stehen und betrachteten das Feuer auf dem Boden, den Kampf und die Agonie der letzten züngelnden Flammen.

Mit nüchterner, harter Sprache evoziert Jaeggy eine unheimliche Atmosphäre des Aufwachsens ins Nichts hinein, denn die Ich-Erzählerin fühlt sich weder vom Klerikalen Frédériques noch vom Mondänen Michelines, noch vom Bodenständigen ihrer deutschen Mitbewohnerin, deren Namen sie sogar vergessen hat, angezogen. Sie bleibt außen vor. Die seligen Jahre der Züchtigung beschreibt die Suche nach einem Weg jenseits dieser Vorstellungen:

Ich stehe vor dem Internatsgebäude. Zwei Frauen sitzen auf einer Bank. Ich nickte ihnen zu. Sie reagierten nicht. Ich öffnete die Tür. Eine Frau sitzt an einem Tisch. Eine andere steht. Sie fragt mich, was ich wolle. Ich erkundigte mich nach dem [Bausler-]Internat […] Ich wiederholte noch einmal den Namen des Internats. Ich irrte mich, sagte sie. Ich entschuldigte mich. Dies, sagte sie, sei eine Klinik für Blinde. So ist das jetzt. Eine Klinik für Blinde.

Das Institut führt die Folgsamen und die Gehorsamen, die nicht durch den Verblendungszusammenhang schreiten oder schreiten wollen, durch das Leben. Vertrauen macht blind. Die Ich-Erzählerin jedoch, die stimmig, mit Intensität, berichtet, hat jedes Vertrauen in die Welt verloren. Sie liegt in Scherben, die Welt als Bruchstücke um sie herum. Die seligen Jahre der Züchtigung sammelt die Scherben zwar auf, aber kreiert kein perspektivisches Bild aus ihnen. Es bleibt ein Bruchwerk, ein Raunen, aber ein gänsehauterzeugendes, und in diesem Sinne schließt sie an Robert Walsers Jakob von Gunten gekonnt an, steht zwischen Ingeborg Bachmann und Elfriede Jelinek, in der Sphäre einer Ágota Kristóf aus Das große Heft und einer Ariane Koch aus Die Aufdrängung

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Details – ab hier Spoilergefahr (zur Erinnerung für mich):
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Inhalt: Jugend einer Vierzehnjährigen in der Schweiz in der Nachkriegszeit in den 1950er. Die Ich-Erzähler bleibt namenlos, die Mutter lebt in Brasilien, der Vater besucht sie hier und da. Sie verbringt auf Wunsch ihrer Mutter ihre Jugend in zwei Internaten, im Bausler-Institut bei den Erzieherpaar Hofstetter, und dann am Zuger See, bei Mater Hermenegild. Im Bausler-Institut wirbt eine junge Schülerin um sie, Marion, während die Ich-Erzählerin die neue und geheimnisvolle Schülerin Frédérique anhimmelt. Sie befreunden sich. Als Micheline, eine extrovertierte Tochter eines reichen Vaters, auftaucht, kühlt sich das Verhältnis ab, da die Ich-Erzählerin sich zu Micheline hingezogen fühlt. Als Frédériques Vaters stirbt, verlässt sie das Internat. Die Ich-Erzählerin trifft sie zweimal wieder, einmal in Paris im Zusammenhang mit einem Kinobesuch. Die Ich-Erzählerin stellt fest, dass Frédérique in einem nahezu leeren Zimmer schläft; und zum weiten Mal, nachdem Frédérique das Haus ihrer Mutter in Brand gesetzt hat und kurz vor der Einweisung in eine Irrenanstalt steht. Marion unterdessen blüht auf und wird selbstbewusst und extravagant, und Micheline feiert einen Ball, auf den auch die Ich-Erzählerin erscheint. Des Weiteren gibt es die Tochter eines afrikanischen Präsidenten, die besondere Aufmerksamkeit der Hofstetters erhält.
… vgl. Robert Walsers Jakob von Gunten, Anspielungen auf sein Werk, und hierdurch auch auf Robert Musils Zögling Törleß, siehe auch Sylvia Plaths Die Glasglocke und die Romane von Clarice Lispector, bspw. Die Sternstunde.
… Zwiespalt der Rollenvorstellung, so disparat, so verworren, dass eine Grabesstille entsteht, ein Ägyptizismus als Rollenmumie, narrativ, reflektorisch eingeholt. Der Schmerz, die Intensität stellen sich mittelbar, zwischen den Zeilen ein, eine Art gruseliger Zwangszusammenhang senkt sich, Atemlosigkeit, und dadurch wird die Atmosphäre dicht, immersiv und überzeugend, die in solchen Erziehungsanstalten geherrscht haben mag, vielleicht etwas allzu gedrängt. --> 4 Sterne

Form: Abwechslungsreich, verdichtet, schriftsprachlich und poetisch. Kaum Phrasen, abwechslungsreicher Satzbau, interessante Verben, wenig Hilfsverben. Allegorische Bilder, mutige Paraphrasen und sprachliches Hinauswachsen in den Moment eines erstrebten Ausdrucks. Todesversessen. Starr. Nüchtern. Kalt. Weniger getragen, aber vergleichbar mit Lispectors Die Sternstunde und Ingeborg Bachmanns Malina --> 5 Sterne

Erzählstimme: Ich-Erzählerin, die aus dem Rückblick die Ereignisse ihrer Jugend re-imaginiert. Erzählgegenwart nur assoziativ vorhanden, die Ich-Erzählerin situiert nicht ihr Schreiben, nur ihr Erinnern, auch zeitliche Distanz unklar (aber mehr als 20 Jahre). Im Erinnern Wechsel von Präteritum und Präsens möglich, sehr dynamisch, selbstvergewissernd, Reflexionen im Text durch Klammern eingebaut. Sehr assoziativ, der Erinnerungsraum zeitlos. Plausibilisierung der Schreibposition: Versuch, einen Abschluss zu finden. --> 5 Sterne

Komposition: Die Schwachstelle der Novelle, die keine ist. Die Gattungsbezeichnung trifft es nicht. Es ist eine längere Erzählung ohne Ereignis, der kein Roman ist. Perspektivisch tritt der Text auf der Stelle. Er weiß nicht wohin mit den Ereignissen, formt sie nicht. Lässt sie bestehen. Aber durchformt die Erzählstimme ihre Form nicht. Sie hat die Sprache, den Inhalt, die Stimmigkeit, aber rundet es nicht ab. Es bleibt eine Form loser Betrachtung, die poetisch, überzeugend, aber unvollendet scheint. --> 2 Sterne

[JimZ · Rating 4 out of 5]

Well! Now if that wasn’t a depressing read I do not what else it could have been. I do not believe there is a positive sentence in the whole book. That’s not necessarily a criticism of the book, as I very much liked it. This is the second book I have read by Jaeggy (the first being the excellent but almost just-as-depressing SS Proleterka) and I think it will take me some getting used to her style. Fleur Jaeggy (born 31 July 1940) is a Swiss author, who writes in Italian.

This is a novella (101 pages, paperback) set in post-war Switzerland at a girls’ boarding school. The protagonist, a 14-year old girl who I believe is unnamed throughout, describes a year at the boarding school. That includes her interactions with the other girls there, primarily with a cold aloof but attractive and intelligent girl, Frederique, and every now and then her father (who lives in hotels) and her mother (who I guess pays for the boarding schools since age 8 and up to age 17 – the mother, divorced from the father, lives in Brazil and never visits her daughter) and the head-mistress and head-master. Other than the following two passages just to give an example of Jaeggy’s writing style I will not divulge any other details of the novella to avoid giving out spoilers: 😊
• “…and I never stopped expecting a letter from her. She is not one of the dead. I was sure I wouldn’t see her again, and that partly thanks to our education, which taught us to renounce the good things in life, to fear good news.”
• “One day I found a little love note in my pigeon hole, it was from a 10-year-old girl who begged me to let her become my favourite, to make a pair. Impulsively I answered with an unfriendly no, and I still regret it today. I regretted it then too, immediately, no sooner than I’d told her that I had no use for a sister, that I wasn’t interested in looking after a little favourite. I was getting to be unpleasant because Frederique was eluding me and I had to conquer her, because it would be too humiliating to lose. I only took a look at the younger girl when it was too late and I had already offended her. She was really pretty, very attractive, and I had lost a slave, without getting any pleasure out of it.”

The book was first published in 1989 as I beati anni del castigo (Adelphi Edizioni S.P.A., Milan, 1989). In 1991 it was translated by Tim Parks in 1991 who has written quite a number of books himself (including fiction – Europa (shortlisted for the Booker prize), Destiny, Cleaver, Sex is Forbidden and, most recently, In Extremis…and non-fiction – Italian Neighbours and An Italian Education, Out of My Head – On the Trail of Consciousness). He came across the book while browsing in an Italian bookshop. The book was first issue in English by William Heinemann and New Directions in 1993 and re-issued by And Other Stories in 2018. I have the 2018 re-issue version.
“And Other Stories” sounds like my kind of publishing house. In the back of the novella, the publisher states that “As well as relying on bookshop sales, And Other Stories relies on subscriptions from people like you for many of our books, whose stories other publishers often consider too risky to take on.” There is a list of 60 current and upcoming books, and many of them are translations! I intend to do some digging…this could be a treasure trove. Here is their website: https://www.andotherstories.org/

This book won two awards – the Premio Bagutta (1990) and the Premio Speciale Rapallo (1990). Tim Parks garnered the John Florio Prize for the translation.

There were the following blurbs are on the front and back cover:
• Extraordinary – Joseph Brodsky
• A wonderful, brilliant, savage writer. – Susan Sontag
• Jaeggy has a startling ability to go beyond: beyond the sentimental heart, the writerly niceties, the conventions that bind us, and the messy effusions of contemporary life. – Sheila Heti, New Yorker
• She has the enviable first glance for people and things, she harbours a mixture of distracted levity and authoritative wisdom. – Ingeborg Bachmann
• Like all great books, it’s really like nothing else. It’s like itself. – Gabe Habash

Here is a review of the novella along with a review in general of her and her oeuvre. You might want to hold off on reading the review until after reading Sweet Days of Discipline as it is replete with spoilers: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/20...

[Blair · Rating 4 out of 5]

Sweet Days of Discipline is an inscrutable narrative – 'story' seems a completely unsuitable word – told by a teenage girl at boarding school. It seems impossible to say what it is really about. The girl describes her infatuation with a classmate named Frédérique, but there is no obvious resolution to this relationship, nor any of the others in the story. Everyone is isolated and distant and sad, even as passions among the girls rise and crash like waves. The students seem to crave death as much as sex or beauty. The prose is sparse, cold and morbid.

Sweet Days of Discipline and I Am the Brother of XX have different translators, but Jaeggy's spare style remains recognisable. As with XX, I was compelled to note down/highlight sentences and passages from the first page onwards. Jaeggy has a gift for near-contradictory phrases that stick in the mind: 'tropical stagnation', 'thwarted luxuriance', 'cheerful vendetta', 'funereal fervour'.

---
You can't help but take walks in the Appenzell. If you look at the small white-framed windows and the busy, fiery flowers on the sills, you get this sense of tropical stagnation, a thwarted luxuriance, you have the feeling that inside something serenely gloomy and a little sick is going on. It's an Arcadia of sickness. Inside, it seems, in the brightness in there, is the peace and perfection of death, a rejoicing of whitewash and flowers.

I was looking for solitude, and perhaps the absolute.

We retire to our rooms; we saw life pass by beneath our windows, observed it in books and on our walks, watched the seasons change. It was always a reflection, a reflection that seemed to freeze on our windowsills... We imagined the world. What else can we imagine now if not our own deaths? The bell rings and it's all over.

Fleetingly, as she was speaking, I thought I saw a strange light in her eyes, like the snowflakes, mad and pointless, hanging still in the air. I was afraid, I wanted to tell her to save herself, but I didn't know from what.

The school was cloaked in a subterranean wind, life was rotting, or regenerating itself.

Up on the hill I was in a state you might describe as 'ill-happiness'. A state that required solitude, a state of exhilaration and quiet selfishness, a cheerful vendetta.

I had fun with Micheline, even if her cheerfulness and her daddy were boring me, but you can enjoy a fatuous cheerfulness despite the boredom, a funereal fervour.

I went back to the school and spent my time with my misery, which is a way like any other of spending time.

There's a breath of resurrection in the air, murder transformed into a state of grace.

Her beauty has become a parody. The old face is already sketched out in the young... the way some babies are scarcely born before they're reminding you of the grandparent who just died.

Micheline's dress was lace and silk and seemed to be have been cut from time itself, so well suited was it for the ball and, Micheline fantasised, for her death bed... What are the girls thinking of? At least half are nostalgic for death, and for a temple, and for all those clothes.

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[Paula Mota · Rating 4 out of 5]

Revejo as minhas companheiras de infância de quando tinha oito anos, em lençóis alvos, com sorrisos, pálpebras baixadas, o olhar sumiu-se. Dividimos as camas com elas. Também nas prisões não se esquece o companheiro de cela. São rostos que alimentam e comem o nosso cérebro, os nossos olhos. Não existe tempo, naquele tempo. Vetusta é a infância.

A menção a Robert Walser logo na primeira página de “Felizes Anos de Castigo” não é inocente, é antes a chave para este breve romance, e quem não souber nada sobre esse escritor suíço não compreenderá toda a sua dimensão, creio eu. E quem como eu nunca leu Walser não alcançará todas as referências de Fleur Jaeggy a castigo, disciplina, rigor, pelo que revisitarei esta obra depois de o fazer.
Tal como Walser, a narradora deste livro, uma jovem de 14 anos que estuda em colégios internos desde os oito, dá longas caminhadas diárias na mais completa solidão. Numa escola cheia de raparigas, percebe-se a dinâmica entre elas, os jogos de poder e até um certo homoerotismo.

Teria considerado uma honra dobrar as minhas camisolas. Éramos fetichistas.

Neste cenário cheio de tensões e alianças, chega a reservada e enigmática Frédérique.

Uma bela fronte alta, onde os pensamentos se podiam tocar, onde gerações passadas lhe haviam transmitido talento, inteligência, fascínio. Não falava com ninguém. O aspeto era o de um ídolo, desdenhoso. Talvez por isso eu desejasse conquistá-la. Não tinha humanidade.

Num breve período de tempo, estabelece-se um relacionamento de aproximações e afastamentos, em que a narradora tenta controlar o seu arrebatamento como um exercício mental…

Nunca demos a mão. E tê-lo-íamos achado ridículo. Viam-se pelos caminhos rapariguinhas de mão dada, a rirem-se, a “fazerem de amigas”, a fazerem de amantes. Em nós, havia uma espécie de fanatismo que impedia qualquer efusão física.

…mas a impressão que Frédérique deixa nela é indelével e assombra-a.

Passaram tantos anos, e ainda torno a ver o seu rosto, um rosto que busquei noutras mulheres, que nunca encontrei. Era muito íntegra. Uma coisa perigosa.

É pelo estilo elegantemente brutal de Jaeggy, com manifestos laivos de morbidez, que este livro vale realmente a pena, sendo de notar a sua profusão de aforismos e recursos expressivos surpreendentes.

Nos colégios, pelo menos aquele em que estive, prolongava-se quase até à demência, uma infância senil.

O armário, querida e pequena morgue dos nossos pensamentos.

De resto, existirá uma forma de pensar sem palavras? Como se a humanidade fosse um abecedário e cada existência formada por letras.

[Nate D · Rating 4 out of 5]

Bracing, crisp, austere as alpine air. All boarding schools echo totalitarian regimes in some way, but here the time -- the immediate postwar period -- and location -- Switzerland, where students of recently-warring nations converge, speaking French as often as German -- make the shadow of fascism especially palpable, even if rarely referenced in any direct way. Jaeggy doesn't need to, her slim, rigorously ascetic novel breaths control and release, pent-up sexuality and societal constraint, building phantom scenarios that exist without ever quite needing to coalesce on the page. Nothing happens, yet everything is suggested.

[Emmeline · Rating 5 out of 5]

In boarding schools, or at least the ones where I went, a sort of senile childhood was protracted almost to insanity.

A short, austere, perplexingly gripping account of an adolescent infatuation in an all-girl Swiss boarding school. Jaeggy’s novel is a demonstration that voice – here cold, reserved, passionate, cynical, enamoured – can overcome all seeming obstacles in fiction, including lack of plot, lack of clarity, perhaps even lack of characterization.

The nameless narrator is a long-term boarder. Now in her teens, she has been institutionalized since she was eight years old. Her father is only semi-present, and lives in a series of hotels. Her mother sends detailed instructions, but lives in Brazil and never visits. Boarding school is a sort of hazy composite of real life (a president’s daughter is given special status) and complete unreality. A new girl, Frédérique, appears and the narrator cleaves to her. Their relationship is described in terms of love, and in terms of indifference. Some other girls float through the pages too. Frédérique may be a little different than she seems at first.

Place is important. The school in in the Appenzell in Switzerland, near to where Robert Walser died on a walk from his mental hospital. This is invoked in the first sentence and may be key to the whole story. More generally, the place reflects the tone of the book, hot and cold, frigid and lush:

You can’t help but take walks in the Appenzell. If you look at the small white-framed windows and the busy, fiery flowers on the sills, you get this sense of tropical stagnation, a thwarted luxuriance, you have the feeling that inside something serenely gloomy and a little sick is going on…. Outside the windows the landscape beckons; it isn’t a mirage, it’s a Zwang as we used to say in school, a duty.

A book like this that depends so much on tone lives or dies by its translation, and this translation is excellent. The translator Tim Parks, author of several caustic-but-true essays on the subject, would criticize me for saying so, since I don’t read Italian, but from my limited perspective I believe you can see even in the title what he’s done. The original translates literally as “the lovely (blessed?) years of punishment,” and from that we get the lyrical, alliterative, caressing “Sweet days of discipline” with its alluring repeating s’s and d’s. It was the kind of translation in which, if a word felt strange or out of place, you knew it felt that way for a reason.

This is female friendship earlier and stranger than Elena Ferrante, ambiguous girl protagonists à la Shirley Jackson, all with a chilly, unmistakably European feel.

[Rita · Rating 3 out of 5]

No Appenzell, é impossível não dar passeios. Se olharmos para as pequenas janelas debruadas de branco e para as flores buliçosas e incandescentes nos peitoris, percebemos uma estagnação tropical, um luxuriar refreado, temos a impressão de que dentro acontece alguma coisa de serenamente turvo e um pouco doentio. Uma Arcádia da doença.

Estamos no colégio interno Bausler Institut, seguindo os passos das alunas que, dia após dia, se aproximam da tão desejada liberdade e caminham em direcção à idade adulta. O cenário parece idílico, mas o enredo oferece muito pouco. Li e compreendi, mas falta-lhe a profundidade emocional que poderia envolver-me numa experiência mais visceral e cativante.

E se calhar foram os melhores anos, pensava. Os anos de castigo. Há como que uma exaltação, ligeira mas constante, nos anos de castigo, nos felizes anos de castigo.


#incunábulos @mastodon

[Jillian B · Rating 5 out of 5]

A boarding school student in post-war Switzerland becomes obsessed with a classmate. While our narrator has a feral streak, repressing rage beneath the surface, glamorous Frederique is elegant and composed. It’s not entirely clear—to the narrator or the reader—whether she wants to be with her or become her.

This book has so many themes that will resonate with today’s readers and I can’t wait for more of them to discover it. It has it all: female rage, sapphic vibes, and the quiet desperation of girlhood. The prose is quite sparse and straightforward, and yet somehow gorgeously evocative. This is a super quick read (I devoured it in two sittings) and I need more of you guys to read it so we can talk about it 😂

[Banu Yıldıran Genç · Rating 3 out of 5]

3,5 yıldız diyeyim. benim için fazla minimalist. yani 2 kızın arkadaşlığı üzerine 4 ciltlik napoli romanlarını okumuş bir insanım. her detayı, her duyguyu bilmek istiyorum galiba arkadaşlık söz konusu olduğunda.
isimsiz bir anlatıcının yatılı okul günlerini anlatmasıyla başlıyor roman. brezilya'dan emirler yağdıran despot bir anne -ki çok merak ettim ilişkilerini-, yaşlı ve otellerde kalan bir baba, evsizlik, 8 yaşından itibaren hep ama hep yatılı okullarda kalmak... anlatıcının birçok öğrenciyi sanki değip geçer gibi anlatmasıyla ilerliyor roman, kimseyi tam bilemiyoruz, bilinmesini de istemiyor. bir tek hayran hatta aşık olduğunu itiraf ettiği, anlatıcıdan daha da mesafeli ve uzak frederique var okul sonrası merak edip de görüştüğü. onunki de trajik bir hikâye ama yine detaysız, yazarın bize açtığı küçücük bilgilerden anladığımız.
ikinci dünya savaşı sonrası garip ve soğuk isviçre ortamını aslında tam anlamıyla yansıtmış yazar. ama ben daha akdenizliyim galiba :)

[Cody · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very intriguing lilt to the rhythm. Reminds me of Suicide’s first album: bare bones, but haunting bones they be.

(7-year-later update: Suicide’s SECOND ALBUM is where it’s at, kids—3.5.25)

[Rupert · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was given to me by The Enigmatic Amy Poe with The Raven Hair. And God knows I love the darkness, but the gravity on this one is the kind that grabs your ankles and won't let you go. Some darkness, say like early songs of Leonard Cohen, give me a masochistic energy, or maybe it's comfort of sharing, which is energizing. But this book, which is well written and kept me going, ended up making me feel like the universe was an empty place. Do not read in February or after a breakup or while quitting any drug or alcohol. Or while traveling to Ohio.