A dysfunctional splendor: the writing of Fleur Jaeggy

No one knows if Fleur Jaeggy likes to sleep alone, walk around the house barefoot or talk on the phone. If he was happy in his relationship with Roberto Calasso, if he has ever loved a woman. If you write only when Hermes, your typewriter, agrees to dictate text to you.

Parsimony and retraction are his hallmark.

He once said, “I hate social relationships.”

He also said: “When I write, I start by taking things away, I erase them in my head.”

In this exercise of divestment, an extreme interiority is born and unfolds which suppresses or makes the anecdote superfluous, privileging the absent syllables, That which has always opposed sterile information and market trends.

It would seem that each of his books reopens the right to dissent, and brings out unpublished splinters from an empty crater.

The challenge for the reader is great. We need to delve into stories full of disjointed sentences, altered verb tenses, unstable points of view, characters who change their name or sex as if they were ill without a diagnosis. And this, without any intrigue or achievement to finish articulating a conflict, much less resolve it.

The resulting hermeticism is dazzling.

Also the clarity of the aesthetic proposal.

Coldness was imposed on him. It’s not strange: intelligence is often confused with emotional anesthesia.

“The glacial also reveals feelings, perhaps clearer, purer, more direct. It is as if the cold condensed the lexicon, loading the nouns with meaning.”

His own defense is devastating: “The glacial also reveals feelings, perhaps clearer, purer, more direct. It is as if the cold condensed the lexicon, loaded the nouns with meaning.”

The truth is that this corrosive and at the same time perversely delicate writer never stops creating characters who convey the anguish of a life tied to that great umbilical cord that is death.

Adults or children, and especially girls without age or specific physiognomy, coming from families marked by suicide or abuse, are forced to breathe in ever-shrinking circles, to move through truncated stories, with nothing but their waking hallucinations.

All his books, from the first…finger in mouth AND The water statues— until the endProleterka OR The last in line— They display the same repugnant laconism: They build miniatures with terminal figures who, having given up a significant part of life, both in experiences and in relationships (especially regarding the consumption and use of time), launch themselves into projects and desires that they are unable to know or formulate. Pruning prevails in all of them, the way of sculpting silence by juxtaposing levels of meaning, of attacking the grammatical and syntactic order (which is also a moral order).

A ruthless bet in favor of the rebels.

It’s better to say it right away: the great protagonist of these books is language. This is demonstrated by the linguistic shocks, the adjectives (“He took me by the hand to take long hygienic walks” // “at home everything was sparse, natural and broken”), the irrational or incongruous juxtapositions (people who began to be happy in the “dirt of sweetness”), the uncertain enunciative position and the phrasings that fuel the chaos. We must not forget that the words are, for this author, almost as misanthropic as the characters and that they live an asocial life like them in a stolen everyday world.

In Jaeggy’s career, however, there is a turning point where the breakups suddenly become intelligible. I am referring to his great autobiographical novel, The beautiful years of punishment. There the cruel music and the elusiveness of the plot persist, but the eccentricity is put at the service of an emotional nakedness that exposes and doubles the pain, making it tragically lucid. This Bildungsroman The result is, as Sara Mesa underlined, a true “vision of the world that includes the confinement and repression of the feminine, the initiation of sex, the shadow of war, the cruelty between women, the moral weight of inheritance and the attraction of suffering”.

Everything that his writing has conquered, cultivated and hated finds its culmination here, but the desperate euphoria, the dysfunctional splendor of his prose that reminds us so much raw art and to the visions of epileptics they have not ceased to be true to themselves.

Linked like Georg Büchner but also like Franz Kafka, Ünica Zurn or Robert Walser to the literature of fatigue, meaninglessness and detachment from existence, this writer, like them, unfolds a hybrid music which, pretending to have lost its sense of direction, actually advances “like a locomotive against monotony”. His writing, Marguerite Duras would say, “screams without noise”.

Fleur Jaeggy was born in 1940 in Zurich. Daughter of an Argentine mother, she experienced the consequences of war up close on a continent in ruins. She too, like her poet friend Ingeborg Bachmann (who called her “little lion“), left his native country and settled in Italy, hypothesizing a voluntary exile which, in his case, was also linguistic: German, he said, is the language of funerals.

To the novels and stories already mentioned we must add The guardian angel (1971), The fear of paradise (1994) e conjectural lives (2009) and also its Italian translations by Thomas de Quincey and Marcel Schwob. He has received numerous awards: the Bocaccio Europa 1994, the Donna Città di Roma 2002, the Times Literary Supplement 2003, the Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa 2015, the Gottfried Keller 2024 and the Grand Prix of Swiss Literature 2025.

Susan Sontag called her a “wild, sharp and brilliant” writer.

Fleur Jaeggy
Translation by Mariano Solivellas
Tusquets, 2025
104 pages. 17.90 euros