Other editions of book 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 Jaeggy’s 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 Fréderique, 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.

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 cover A novel about obsessive love and madness set in postwar Switzerland, Fleur Jaeggy’s 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 Fréderique, 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.

Sweet Days of DisciplineThe best years of the anonymous protagonist are spent in custody away from her relatives incarcerated in the walls of a college where it seems that life have also become still and where strict laws rule. The details of the student’s routine however parallel with “the description of the strange feeling which could be called torturing bliss and the prerequisite of which was absolute loneliness”. That was the price to pay.