Family, obsession, and privilege boiled down by the icy-hot Swiss-Italian master stylist Fleur Jaeggy
Even among Fleur Jaeggyâs singular and intricate works, The Water Statues is a shiningly peculiar book. Concerned with loneliness and wealthâs odd emotional poverty, this early novel is in part structured as a play: the dramatis personae include the various relatives, friends, and servants of a man named Beeklam, a wealthy recluse who keeps statues in his villaâs flooded basement, where memories shiver in uncertain light and the waters run off to the sea.
Dedicated to Ingeborg Bachmann and fleshed out with Jaeggyâs austere yet voluptuous style, The Water Statuesâwith its band of deracinated, loosely related souls (milling about as often in the distant past as in the mansionâs garden full of intoxicated snails)âdelivers like a slap an indelible picture of the swampiness of family life.
Family, obsession, and privilege boiled down by the icy-hot Swiss-Italian master stylist Fleur Jaeggy
Even among Fleur Jaeggyâs singular and intricate works, The Water Statues is a shiningly peculiar book. Concerned with loneliness and wealthâs odd emotional poverty, this early novel is in part structured as a play: the dramatis personae include the various relatives, friends, and servants of a man named Beeklam, a wealthy recluse who keeps statues in his villaâs flooded basement, where memories shiver in uncertain light and the waters run off to the sea.
Dedicated to Ingeborg Bachmann and fleshed out with Jaeggyâs austere yet voluptuous style, The Water Statuesâwith its band of deracinated, loosely related souls (milling about as often in the distant past as in the mansionâs garden full of intoxicated snails)âdelivers like a slap an indelible picture of the swampiness of family life.