I Am the Brother of XX

by Fleur Jaeggy, Gini Alhadeff (Translator)

Overview

Sensational, hyper-distilled new stories by the inimitable Fleur Jaeggy

Fleur Jaeggy is often noted for her terse and telegraphic style, which brews up a haunting paradox: despite a zero-at-the-bone baseline, her fiction is intensely moving. As April Bernard commented in Newsday, how work “could be so chilly and so passionate at the same time is a puzzle, but that icy-hot quality is only one of its distinctions.” Here, in her newest collection, I Am the Brother of XX—whether the stories involve famous writers (Calvino, Ingeborg Bachmann, Joseph Brodsky) or baronesses, thirteenth-century visionaries or tormented siblings raised in elite Swiss boarding schools—Jaeggy contrives to somehow stealthily possess your mind. Her champagne gothic worlds are seething with quiet violence—and unforgettable.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780811225984
Publisher:	New Directions Publishing Corporation
Publication date:	07/25/2017
Pages:	128
Sales rank:	169,658
Product dimensions:	4.90(w) x 6.90(h) x 0.50(d)

About the Author

The London Times Literary Supplement named Fleur
Jaeggy’s S.S. Proleterka as a Best
Book of the Year; and her Sweet Days of
Discipline won the Premio Bagutta as well as the Premio Speciale Rapallo.

The author of The Sun at Midday and Diary of a Djinn, Gini Alhadeff translated to great acclaim Patrizia Cavalli’s My Poems Won’t Change the World.

Editorial Reviews

★ 03/20/2017
The stories in Jaeggy’s (Sweet Days of Discipline) collection are masterpieces of fury and restraint. Most are only a few pages, and the short, declarative sentences burrow into the deepest corners of the characters’ psyches, only to suddenly subvert expectations. In the title story, a brother feels his life is dominated by his sister’s influence: “When I talk my sister pays too much attention. She watches me. Maybe she is writing my story, as long as I am not dead yet like my parents. I’ve always wondered whether one of them might have died because of her.” In “Agnes,” a man reflects on his past relationship with a woman who has left him: “At that time I was still using words. Small gifts. Flowers. I courted her. She threw away the flowers. Laughed at the words. Had no use for the gifts.” The man offers the woman’s new husband “the wedding dress, the ring. And something I can’t say.” This trademark combination of directness and elusiveness is also apparent in “F.K.,” in which a woman searches for her friend who has deserted a psychiatric clinic. The woman meets her friend’s guardian, a “woman of the law” who “took care of her,” which dredges up the narrator’s guilt and fears about the worst outcome of the situation. 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. (July)

Publishers Weekly

Jaeggy seems to have crushed a glass in her palm and tweezed out a few shards for the page. Her prose is indeed extraordinary...it is also frightening.

Coopa Dan

How a novel could be so chilly and so passionate at the same time is a puzzle, but that icy-hot quality is only one of the distinctions of Sweet Days of Discipline.”

Soul-Jah

Nothing rivals its intensity.

The Los Angeles Review of Books

Fleur Jaeggy’s pen is an engraver’s needle depicting roots, twigs, and branches of the tree of madness—extraordinary.

Joseph Brodsky

A wonderful, brilliant, savage writer.

Susan Sontag

This book is twisted and hypnotizing and, somehow, downright lovely.
Reading it is not unlike diving naked and headlong into a bramble of black rosebushes, so intrigued you are by their beauty: it’s a swift,
prickly undertaking, and you emerge the other end bloodied all over.

Susan Dwight & The Minks

Startling and original—so disturbing and so haunting.

A Girl A Gun A Ghost

Swiss-Italian
Jaeggy, a master of the short form, again creates something unforgettable with these otherworldly stories, translated by Gini
Alhadeff. They frame haunting, dreamlike moments: a 13th-century woman senses the taste of “Christ’s foreskin …tender as egg skin and verysweet”; an orphan burns alive thearistocrat who took her in “for the blasted glory of it”; a family is cursed by a possessed mandrake root. 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 ofpaintings by Leonora Carrington or Max Ernst: “her hands, like the claws of a crustacean, clutched at a little mound of dust”. This is anintensely beautiful and original collection that bristles with a strange and often disturbing magic.

Tatyana Zagorovskaya

Jaeggy's astute compression of narrative detail is at once serene and startling. Beneath a placid, opalescent surface lurks a threat or violence that may or may not be realized, but which contributes to the profound impression that people and their lives are unpredictable, coursing with icy, barren wildness.

Los Angeles Review of Books

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? I Am the Brother of XX bears the thematic hallmarks of Jaeggy’s fiction...stony family relations and theology that is not merely unorthodox but downright perverse. Jaeggy’s prose is superb (and as superbly translated) as ever, her characteristic desolation as self-possessed as it is recherché.”

Financial Times

Finely distilled and evocative stories.

BBC

2017-05-02
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 (S.S. Proleterka, 2003, etc.) 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 the gloomy title story, a man describes his love-hate relationship with his entrancing older sister. At age 8 he tells his grandmother all he wants to do when he grows up is die and, later, recalls how his mother's coffin looked after someone placed flowers on it: "Little sweets, little strawberries, a flowery meadow on our mother's skull." There's a story about a visit to a hospital burn unit ("The Aseptic Room"), an artwork that mirrors life ("Portrait of an Unknown Woman"), and a "puritanically serene" family with a Nazi past ("The Aviary"). Two stories focus on famous writers, Joseph Brodsky ("Negde") and Ingeborg Bachmann ("The Salt Water House"). Jaeggy's prose is silken, especially when violence occurs. In "The Heir," an old woman collapses in a fire that may have been set by her servant, who notes in cold, heartbreaking detail how "her hands, like the claws of a crustacean, clutched a little mound of dust." The wealthy, death-obsessed family in "The Last of the Line" lives out a fable of decadence in decay, where lakes dream and haunting portraits portend murder. And it's a testament to Jaeggy's skill that her gothic fiction can stand alongside a story such as "Names," about a visit to Auschwitz, where, "the flowers before the Wall of Death are limp. During the night they freeze." In prismatic translation from the Italian, these tiny tales sparkle with wit and worldly wisdom.

Kirkus Reviews