Jenny Turner in 2023 in LRB: ‘Jaeggy was born in Zürich in 1940 and writes in Italian, with intrusions from French, even English sometimes, but mostly German, “the language of funerals, of sermons”, and it can’t be an accident that the first bit of German in her most famous book, Sweet Days of Discipline (1989), is the word for “duty”, Zwang.’

Also: ‘In 2021 the New Yorker published an interview with Jaeggy by Dylan Byron, who found her “impeccably elegant in crisp whites and royal blues, her fine silver hair clipped back in a signature tortoiseshell barrette”.’

And: ‘“We retire to our rooms, we saw life pass by beneath our windows, observed it in books and on our walks,” the narrator says in Sweet Days of Discipline.’

According to a Swiss friend, Fleur Jaegy might win the Nobel Prize this year. She deserves it, if only for Sweet Days of Discipline.

(a sf 2250)