Description

A wife is suspended in a bird cage; a thirteenth-century visionary senses the foreskin of Christ on her tongue: Fleur Jaeggy’s gothic imagination knows no limits. Whether telling of mystics, tormented families or famously private writers, Jaeggy’s terse, telegraphic writing is always psychologically clear-eyed and deeply moving, always one step ahead, or to the side, of her readers’ expectations. In this, her long-awaited return, we read of an ‘eerie maleficent calm, a brutal calm’, and recognise the timbre of a writer for whom a paradoxical world seethes with quiet violence.

Publisher Review

'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 -------- 'Startling and original-so disturbing and so haunting.' Cathleen Schine, The New York Review Of Books----'Thank the gods and tip the devil for Fleur Jaeggy!' Claire-Louise Bennett, author of Pond