Jaeggy, a master of the short form, again creates something unforgettable with these otherworldly stories ... Told in Jaeggy’s characteristically jagged prose, these dark stories of madness, loss and murder are urgent and evocative. Central to each are surreal images reminiscent of paintings by Leonora Carrington or Max Ernst: 'her hands, like the claws of a crustacean, clutched at a little mound of dust.' This is an intensely beautiful and original collection that bristles with a strange and often disturbing magic.
The first, I Am the Brother of XX, is a collection of stories, monologues and memoir, less cohesive than her previous books but with the same stark, surprising prose, here translated by Gini Alhadeff. These are grim tales, often violent ... Yet even in these softer, melancholic pieces, darkness seems never far away, and literally isn’t, since much of the book is filled with tales of death and madness ... It is also filled, to an uncanny degree, with actual portraits ... For Jaeggy, a painting or photograph is a doorway to the dead, and entering through it involves existential risk.
Jaeggy is a master of the short form; her essays are charged with a nearly combustible vitality, her stories without fail are compact and devastating. Long after the pleasure of reading is over, their little hooks tug at — what is it, the heart or the mind ... Most importantly, Jaeggy’s prose is superb (and as superbly translated) as ever, her characteristic desolation as self-possessed as it is recherché,
Susan Sontag once admiringly called Jaeggy a savage writer. You need to be, to write these stories about loners and orphans with such levity. Fleur Jaeggy is like Edward Gorey without the monsters, or Lemony Snicket without the slapstick, though she can be funny, in a sinister way ... A genius of rich, terse prose, Jaeggy writes paragraphs that are gorgeous labyrinths. One sentence pulls ahead, the next circles back to reexamine something from earlier, and the next one might dead-end or take you somewhere entirely new — but to the characters and the reader by extension, it all happens simultaneously ... She achieves more in a paragraph than many can pull off in an entire story; there’s very little out there that resembles Jaeggy’s dark and surreal intensity.
The stories in Jaeggy’s collection are masterpieces of fury and restraint ... These chilling, beguiling stories dig up reflections on solitude, regret, and sometimes even on love. It is thrilling to live in Jaeggy’s worlds, which are so intense they threaten to boil over, yet pull back just enough to keep their secrets.
Few writers push the reader away with the coolness, dignity, and faint melancholy of Fleur Jaeggy. In her new story collection, I Am the Brother of XX, she praises her friend Ingeborg Bachmann, one of the most celebrated Austrian writers of the twentieth century, for needing 'little encouragement not to speak' ... In Jaeggy’s world, characters don’t change or have epiphanies—unless a sudden cruelty, a murder, or a suicide counts. They are as they are, and much of what they are is related to where they’re from—the soil in which they were planted ...are less gothic, less portentous, and less extreme in their cruelties... Her sentences are hard and compact, more gem than flesh. Images appear as flashes, discontinuous, arresting, then gone. Connective sentences are excised; there is sometimes a struggle to know where one is.
Most of the 21 stories in this wide-ranging collection are only a few pages long, and they're jewels of intellect and compassion ... As if taking stock of life through the lens of European history, Swiss writer Jaeggy finds poetry in the thoughts of characters who steal or desecrate, fall into depression, kill without knowing why, each fate revealing a hint about the soul, something from the core of life ... In prismatic translation from the Italian, these tiny tales sparkle with wit and worldly wisdom.
