The style of Sweet Days of Discipline might be called deadpan mystificatory. There are no aids to grasping the connection between discipline, madness, and death which the novel seems to be proposing ... Jaeggy’s tone is abrupt, and there is a kind of dismissive haughtiness (not unlike Frédérique’s) about the way she leaves her readers to flounder, and about her carelessness too. Carelessness seems incongruous in a work that has perfection and perfectionism among its principal themes ... The short narrative—one hundred pages—is dotted with repetitions, loose ends, and unexplained transitions: How, for instance, does the narrator get to know of Frédérique’s attempt to incinerate her mother? And how does the mother manage to find the narrator? These flaws are irritating in a novel as free from fougue and as tight-lipped as this, and so is the literary name-dropping (beginning with Walser). But in spite of them, and because of its hypnotic intensity, this is a gripping, even haunting work: powerful and hard to shake off.
Jaeggy handles this plot with a fine contempt for both sentiment and conventional modes of dramatization...Even so, the torpid world of the Bausler Institut, where for the older girls 'a sort of senile childhood was protracted almost to insanity,' comes to life in Miss X’s compact monologue. The sentences are short, epigrammatic and filled with deadpan humor as well as something more wild and brooding. Miss X breathes the same air as the narrators of Samuel Beckett and Thomas Bernhard, but her manner, which somehow doesn’t seem mannered, is all her own. Muriel Spark’s more astringent, nouveau roman–style performances may be another starting place for comparisons—or maybe Ottessa Moshfegh’s delicious cruelties. Either way, Turgenev, in another life, might have found much to admire here.
... superbly translated by Tim Parks ... Jaeggy explores the thin line between order and madness and illustrates with perfect precision how swiftly loneliness can turn into despair.
Ms. Jaeggy, a Swiss author who writes in Italian, excellently conjures the mortuary eroticism one finds in other European novelists like Thomas Mann and Alberto Moravia...The difference is that Ms. Jaeggy’s prose is whittled and blade-like. Tim Parks’s translation has a startling directness that can almost feel over-pronounced ... Like the boarding school, this short, piercing book maintains an illusion of order, of control. In reality, madness reigns.
How to describe Fleur Jaeggy? She defies categorization, expectation. Her prose style is unlike anyone’s; so is her subject matter and the structure of her strange stories. Her sentences have a blunt, stunted quality, like stone gargoyles perched above an ancient city, blank-eyed, squat and grey, bits of their noses and ears chipped off ... The best description of Jaeggy’s prose that I’ve encountered comes, surprisingly, from the jacket copy for I Am the Brother of XX, which applauds Jaeggy’s 'champagne gothic worlds.' Yes: precisely ... In this book, characters glom on to each other like leeches, sticky and wet ... In Sweet Days of Discipline, violence is not embodied; it is sublimated, and made eerier for it.
The mix of childish innocence and world-weariness (bordering on senility) is certainly well-captured ... a nicely told tale: Jaeggy has the voice down just right for most of the short book, and describes the general feeling of these schooldays convincingly. There's some good observation, and a decent sense of humour ... The dreamily-episodic presentation seems to be appropriate for the decade wasted in these schools, and at just over a hundred pages the book is entirely sufferable. It's not truly compelling, however, though it does have a lingering resonance.
... a novel particularly subterranean in its pleasures ... The themes are so potent and heavy-handed, their odor wafts like rotting fruit from the spine of the book ... If the book were longer I’d have to admit its flaws: repetitions (meant, perhaps, to mirror a disturbed mind), further culs de sac in the plot, some rather high-handed metaphors. But clocking in at a sharp 101 pages, you’re finished before you can lodge a complaint, its contents going down as smoothly as a martini served in an ice-cold glass.
Tim Parks does an admirable job of keeping the ice-cold language flowing. But the novel leaves a sense that its story line is a metaphor for something else, although it is never completely clear what, and after a while this vague profundity starts to get tiring; the ambiguous ending does not improve matters.
