Published in 1993 (first published 1989)
101 pages
Fleur Jaeggy is a Swiss writer, of Italian mother tongue. After completing her studies in Switzerland, Jaeggy went to live in Rome, where she met Ingeborg Bachmann and Thomas Bernhard.
In 1968 she went to Milan to work for the publisher Adelphi Edizioni. Her first masterpiece was the novel I beati anni del castigo (1989). The Times Literary Supplement accounted her novel Proleterka as the best book of 2003. She is also a translator into Italian of Marcel Schwob and Thomas de Quincey.
What is this book about?
Set in postwar Switzerland, Fleur Jaeggy’s eerily beautiful novel begins simply and innocently enough: “At fourteen I was a boarder in a school in the Appenzell.” But there is nothing truly simple or innocent here. With the off-handed knowingness of a remorseless young Eve, the narrator describes life as a captive of the school and her designs to win the affections of the apparently perfect new girl, Fréderique. As she broods over her schemes as well as on the nature of control and madness, the novel gathers a suspended, unsettling energy. Now translated into six languages, I beati anni del castigo in its Italian original won the 1990 Premio Bagutta and the 1990 Premio Speciale Rapallo. In Tim Parks’ consummate translation (with its “spare, haunting quality of a prose poem”), Sweet Days of Discipline was selected as one of the London Times Literary Supplement’s Notable Books of 1992: “In a period when novels are generally overblown and scarcely portable, it is good to be able to recommend [one that is] miraculously short and beautifully written.”
