Volume 45, Number 12 · July 16, 1998
Sleepwalkers
By Cathleen Schine
Last Vanities
by Fleur Jaeggy, translated by Tim Parks
New Directions, 95 pp., $11.95
Fleur Jaeggy writes about despair with such precision that her words can seem almost gentle, as if unhappiness is to be caressed and admired, like a lover's body. Though not as startling and original as Sweet Days of Discipline, her 1993 novel about passion and reserve at a girls' boarding school in Switzerland, Last Vanities, Jaeggy's latest collection of stories, has the same tender frigidity that makes her work so disturbing and so haunting. Jaeggy grew up in Switzerland, lives in Italy, and writes about German-speaking Switzerland in Italian beautifully translated by Tim Parks.
Review, 1782 words
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