Finds: Betina González
After taking a good look at the shelf where she keeps her most cherished books, albums and movies, this is what Betina González decided to share with us.
It’s hard to write about the well-guarded secret that is Fleur Jaeggy (Zurich 1940). A search on the Internet will bring up nothing. Her oeuvre is simply not classifiable, and she has puzzled more than one critic. One need only look at some English language reviews, which dub the plot of this lovely novel that I am recommending ‘fragile’. It is true that Sweet Days of Discipline is about a Catholic boarding school for girls in Switzerland where hardly anything ever really happens. The reader here will not find stories rosy, sweet, light, and lesbian: the real drama is embroidered into the filigree of a cruel and cutting prose which revolves around these girls, their classroom and corridor bickering, all the little ‘sillinesses’ we live from day to day and choose to forget. I read the novel for the first time in English and the translation is excellent: it was enough to make me write my own story about the dark lives of teenagers. A year later, I read the Tusquets Spanish version. My reading produced the same painful effect. It was as if while walking down the street, the wing of an unknown creature brusquely hit my head. You’re never the same again. That anyone should have the nerve to achieve this in language and narrative! That is what I thought, both the first and the second time around. Fleur Jaeggy is one of those authors whom I would passionately want to know, but fear meeting. Rome, Rome.
Finds:
[Rodrigo Blanco Calderón: Maten al león]
[Ricardo Silva Romero: Girls]
Translated by Nouha Homad
It’s hard to write about the well-guarded secret that is Fleur Jaeggy (Zurich 1940). A search on the Internet will bring up nothing. Her oeuvre is simply not classifiable, and she has puzzled more than one critic. One need only look at some English language reviews, which dub the plot of this lovely novel that I am recommending ‘fragile’. It is true that Sweet Days of Discipline is about a Catholic boarding school for girls in Switzerland where hardly anything ever really happens. The reader here will not find stories rosy, sweet, light, and lesbian: the real drama is embroidered into the filigree of a cruel and cutting prose which revolves around these girls, their classroom and corridor bickering, all the little ‘sillinesses’ we live from day to day and choose to forget. I read the novel for the first time in English and the translation is excellent: it was enough to make me write my own story about the dark lives of teenagers. A year later, I read the Tusquets Spanish version. My reading produced the same painful effect. It was as if while walking down the street, the wing of an unknown creature brusquely hit my head. You’re never the same again. That anyone should have the nerve to achieve this in language and narrative! That is what I thought, both the first and the second time around. Fleur Jaeggy is one of those authors whom I would passionately want to know, but fear meeting. Rome, Rome.
Finds:
[Rodrigo Blanco Calderón: Maten al león]
[Ricardo Silva Romero: Girls]
