Sweet Days of Discipline (I beati anni del castigo)

Set in postwar Switzerland, Fleur Jaeggy’s eerily beautiful novel begins simply & 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 & her designs to win the affections of the apparently perfect new girl, Fréderique. As she broods over her schemes as well as on the nature of control & 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 & 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 overblown & scarcely portable, it is good to be able to recommend [one that is] miraculously short & beautifully written."°°° “For our next selections in this week’s missive, we turn to the chaos, cruelties, & uncertainties specific to girlhood & womanhood. In “Sweet Days of Discipline” (1989), by Swiss novelist Fleur Jaeggy, a creepy coldness manifests in the semi-autobiographical story of teen girls at a boarding school in the Alps. In Kaitlin Phillips’s review of Tim Parks’s 1991 translation from the Italian (reissued in 2019), we learn how, “À la The Magic Mountain, Jaeggy deftly situates this mountain boarding school as a breeding ground for bourgeois sterility. Pervasive is ‘this sense of tropical stagnation, a thwarted luxuriance,’ she writes. ‘You have the feeling that inside something serenely gloomy & a little sick is going on.’” — 4 Columns 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 seemingly 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. All Identifiers : isbn:9781911508199 Number of Words in Auth: 2 Formats : EPUB Number of Formats : 1 Has Cover : Yes Single Author : Fleur Jaeggy Original Source : Mirc New Files 02 21 U A Sorted Author by LN, FN: Fleur Jaeggy Title Length : 024 Title Parm D : Sweet Days of Discipline Title Parm F : Sweet Days of Discipline Title Parm A : Sweet Days of Discipline Title Parm B : ( Record ID : 8486 Uncomma Author : Fleur Jaeggy Num of Aut : 1