Review:
Tim Parks does an admirable job of keeping the ice-cold language flowing.
Like all great books, it's really like nothing else. It's like itself.--Gabe Habash
An elegantly structured and stubbornly moving study of innocence destroyed and love denied. Very accomplished indeed.
She has the enviable first glance for people and things, she harbors a mixture of distracted levity and authoritative wisdom.--Ingeborg Bachmann
This short work is packed with violent premonitions, sudden deaths, stabbings, hangings and the language of insanity. There are metaphors drawn from shrouds, altar cloths, coffins, corpses, funeral marches, gallows, guillotines, nooses, cults of the dead and, most affecting of all, stone tablets set in churchyard walls. We are all dying, even as children: as Rilke believed, we carry our deaths within us. Frédérique tells the narrator she has an old woman's hands; the schoolgirls inhabit "a sort of senile childhood" and they have 'a mortuary look.'-- (04/02/2018)
Glorious, acerbic, and sad. I have never gasped so much in sheer literary joy as while reading this novel; just trust me. It's exceptional.--Emily Temple "Lit Hub's Most Anticipated Books of 2019 "
About the Author:
Fleur Jaeggy-- "a wonderful, brilliant, savage writer" (Susan Sontag) --was born in 1940 in Zurich and lives in Milan. Her work has been acclaimed as "small-scale, intense, and impeccably focused "(The New Yorker) and "addictive" (Kirkus).
Tim Parks is the author of more than twenty novels and works of nonfiction, including the best-selling Italian Neighbors and An Italian Education. His novels include Europa which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. His essays have appeared in the The New Yorker and the New York Review of Books. Parks is also a renowned translator from the Italian and lives in Verona.
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