Sweet Days of Discipline

On the heels of I Am the Brother of XX and These Possible Lives, here is Jaeggy's fabulously witchy first book in English, with a new Peter Mendelsund coverA novel about obsessive love and madness set in postwar Switzerland, Fleur Jaeggys eerily beautiful novel begins innocently enough: At fourteen I was a boarder in a school in the Appenzell. But there is nothing innocent here. With the off-handed remorselessness of a young Eve, the narrator describes her potentially lethal designs to win the affections of Frderique, the apparently perfect new girl. In Tim Parks consummate translation (with its spare, haunting quality of a prose poem, TLS), Sweet Days of Discipline is a peerless, terrifying, and gorgeous work.