The return of Fleur Jaeggy, the author who was already wild 50 years in the past | Culture | EUROtoday
Fleur Jaeggy (Zurich, 84 years outdated) says that it isn’t she who has written her novels. And that it isn’t her who has written her tales. That has been your typewriter. “I notice his presence. It is powerful. He has been with me for more than 50 years, ”he says. He has a person’s identify, he warns: Hermes. Like the Greek God. He repeats it with out relaxation within the few interviews he has granted. Their solutions have the phrases counted and crystallinely elusive. He was born in Switzerland, however all his books has written them in Italian: 5 novels, a play and two collections of tales. His identify is linked to the extreme and claustrophobic Austrian literature – in Rome he got here into contact with the genius Thomas Bernhard -, to the interpretation of traditional complexes – Marcel Schwob and Thomas de Quincey – and silence. Of silence, and Hermes, is the one factor that speaks in these interviews, all the time barely uncomfortable.
Although it was not till 1991 when he stood on the European literary map by publishing his third novel, the multipremiad The stunning years of punishment, Jaeggy had debuted in 1968 with the unusually hypnotic The finger within the mouthto which the just about theatrical adopted in 1980 Water statues, pure postmodernity and fragment, literary impressionism, metaphysics of mismatch. Both have simply been recovered in Spanish in a single quantity edited by Tusquets.
De Jaeggy mentioned the Nobel Prize for literature Joseph Brodsky who did not matter what it took to learn one in all his books, as a result of his reminiscence was going to stick with you till the final of your days. Because? His prose seems to be out to locations there, however we will not see. It is uneasiness, however it’s also great, though a really darkish, of immersion within the depths of a stroke that the phrase makes actual, making it a slippery state of consciousness.
According to Juan Cerezo, editor of Tusquets, Jaeggy “has become a more modern and current author than ever.” The rescue operation of these first two information It responds to what you think about a studying want. “Fleur Jaeggy is one of our favorite wild authors, along with Aurora Venturini, Annie Ernaux or Camila Sosa. Or Marguerite Duras, a founding reference of many of them, ”provides Cerezo, who considers it“ radical and disturbing to count from the perspective of altered characters, on the margins ”. “Jaeggy’s stories speak lucidity and cold cruelty of what we hide, and that is why they are recorded in memory,” provides the editor, which advances that the restoration of The finger within the mouth y Water statues It is nothing greater than the start. “We are going to create a Fleur Jaeggy library to relaunch his complete work with a new design.”

First it was, in any case, A finger within the mouth. It is the story of Lung L., a lady of simply 20 years who has spent a time locked in a clinic as a result of typically she loses foot in actuality or settling in one other. The protagonist is usually merciless to whom he crosses in her means, however at occasions it’s also painfully susceptible. The fascinating factor is that Lung comes out and enters the narrative, that the primary individual and the third are confused, the reader typically feels that he’s in his head and different occasions solely observes as a result of he solely attends what occurs. What you’ve in widespread with Water statues It is a strong lacking earlier than actuality, which, on this different story, that of Beeklman and its servant of servants, is totally Beckettian or playful and surreal. Here the fragment – and till the restricted, theatrical intervention – instructions, is earlier than a set of items.
Beeklam, a wealthy and eccentric man, lives in a village in ruins, filled with statues, returning time and again about what lived, in a type of maze that Jaeggy builds dissecting feelings with a magnetic detachment, too human in his obvious inhumanity. Beeklam and his pal Victor seem and disappear from the narrative, are additionally as statues, what stays of what they’ve been, or are being. Jaeggy devoted the novel to the Austrian author INGEBORG Bachmann, who had already been her finest pal who in 1980, when the novel was printed, missed quite a bit. Bachmann had died in 1973 in a fireplace.
A very good a part of what occurs in Water statues y The finger within the mouth “In the same way, the protagonist has never abandoned the habit of putting her finger in her mouth,” the reader imagines, or should do it, as a result of in Jaeggy issues each what isn’t informed as what is claimed.
Unbridled, with a brown American, a white shirt and a garnet sweater, you may see the writer on YouTube at a convention held in a 2015 that could possibly be properly in 1970. “We believe we know what we write, but I would almost say that there is a downtime,” says Jaeggy at a time of the discuss. It is without doubt one of the few and mysterious issues that it says throughout an hour. The final time he spoke with a journalist – from the journal The New Yorker– He mentioned issues like he missed a swan he had met in Berlin some time in the past. It was referred to as Erich. He spoke with him in German. It was the yr 2021. Her husband had simply died, the author and editor Roberto Calasso, whom Jaeggy had met in 1968, when she moved to Milan and started collaborating along with her editorial, Adelphi.

It is claimed that, regardless of the cryptic and symbolic or metaphysical of their tales, all of them have an autobiographical, obsessive and virtually undetectable part, pure impressionism. And talking of biography, if there is a component that distorts and amplifies it, it collaborated with the musician Franco Battiato underneath the pseudonym of Carlotta Wieck. He composed the very uncommon WinterFor instance. Maybe Hermes was additionally written. Hermes says that maybe at some point he can be drained or will become bored with the phrases he writes and can shut up endlessly. “I don’t think he feels alone when he leaves her, but I don’t think he wants to rewrite again,” he noticed at a time at that convention trapped in time, as fragmentary and hypnotic as his work.
This yr they will even get better The Guardian Angel (1971) y The stunning years of punishment (1989). The relaxation, Prolete (2001) and tales books The concern of heaven (1994) y The final of the lineage (2004), will accomplish that subsequent yr.
https://elpais.com/cultura/2025-03-17/el-regreso-de-fleur-jaeggy-la-escritora-que-ya-era-salvaje-hace-50-anos.html