I Am the Brother of XX by Fleur Jaeggy review – otherworldly short stories

Dark stories of madness, loss and murder from a Swiss-Italian master of the short form

It’s a quarter-century since Fleur Jaeggy’s novel Sweet Days of Discipline, of which Joseph Brodsky said, “Reading time … four hours. Remembering time ... the rest of one’s life.” 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 very sweet”; an orphan burns alive the aristocrat 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 of paintings by Leonora Carrington or Max Ernst: “her hands, like the claws of a crustacean, clutched at a little mound of dust”. This is an intensely beautiful and original collection that bristles with a strange and often disturbing magic.

THE GUARDIAN

DE OTROS MUNDOS

8 escritoras comparten su lista definitiva de lecturas para la cuarentena
La dulce crueldad de Fleur Jaeggy
Fleur Jaeggy / Suiza, infame y genial
Fleur Jaeggy / La agonía de los insectos
Fleur Jaeggy / Pétalos enfermos
El perturbador y depurado bisturí de Fleur Jaeggy / A propósito de 'El último de la estirpe'
Fleur Jaeggy / La flor del mal
Fleur Jaeggy / Sublime extrañeza
Fleur Jaeggy / Los hermosos años del castigo / Reseña de Enrique Vila-Matas
Claustrofóbica Fleur Jaeggy
Fleur Jaeggy / Las cosas desaparecen / Entrevista

CUENTOS
Fleur Jaeggy / Negde
Fleur Jaeggy / El último de la estirpe
Fleur Jaeggy / Agnes
Fleur Jaeggy / El velo de encaje negro
Fleur Jaeggy / Un encuentro en el Bronx
Fleur Jaeggy / La heredera
Fleur Jaeggy / La elección perfecta
Fleur Jaeggy / La sala aséptica
Fleur Jaeggy / Retrato de una desconocida
Fleur Jaeggy / Gato
Fleur Jaeggy / Ósmosis
Fleur Jaeggy / La pajarera

DANTE
Il doloroso incanto di Fleur Jaeggy
Fleur Jaeggy e Franco Battiato / Romanzi e canzoni «per anni beati»

DRAGON
The Austere Fiction of Fleur Jaeggy
Fleur Jaeggy’s Mourning Exercise
The Single Most Pristine Certainty / Fleur Jaeggy, Thomas Bernhard, and the Fact of Death
Close to Nothing / The autofictional parodies of Fleur Jaeggy
The Monumental Lonerism of Fleur Jaeggy
Sacred Inertia / Review of I Am the Brother of XX & These Possible Lives by Fleur Jaeggy
I Am the Brother of XX by Fleur Jaeggy review – otherworldly short stories

SHORT STORIES
The Black Lace Veil by Fleur Jaeggy
An Encounter in the Bronx by Fleur Jaeggy
The Heir by Fleur Jaeggy
The Perfect Choice by Fleur Jaeggy