Sweet Days of Discipline - Softcover

`A wonderful, brilliant, savage writer.' Susan Sontag ---------- `Fleur Jaeggy's pen is an engraver's needle depicting roots, twigs, and branches of the tree of madness - extraordinary.' Joseph Brodsky ---------- `She has the enviable first glance for people and things, she harbors a mixture of distracted levity and authoritative wisdom.' Ingeborg Bachmann ---------- `Small-scale, intense, and impeccably focused.' New Yorker ----------'Nothing rivals its intensity.' Los Angeles Times ---------- 'How a novel could be so chilly and so passionate at the same time is a puzzle, but that icy-hot quality is only one of the distinctions of Sweet Days of Discipline.' Newsday ----------- 'Startling and original-so disturbing and so haunting.' The New York Review of Books----'Thank the gods and tip the devil for Fleur Jaeggy!'Claire-Louise Bennett, author of Pond

Set in post-war Switzerland, Fleur Jaeggy's 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 offhanded 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.