I Am the Brother of XX
Fleur Jaeggy
(Author)
Gini Alhadeff
(Translator)
Description
Fleur Jaeggy is often noted for her terse and telegraphic style, which somehow brews up a profound paradox that seems bent on haunting the reader: despite a sort of zero-at-the-bone baseline, her fiction is weirdly also incredibly moving. How does she do it? No one knows. But here, in her newest collection, I Am the Brother of XX, she does it again. Like a magician or a master criminal, who can say how she gets away with it, but whether the stories involve famous writers (Calvino, Ingeborg Bachmann, Joseph Brodsky) or baronesses or 13th-century visionaries or tormented siblings bred up in elite Swiss boarding schools, they somehow steal your heart. And they don't rest at that, but endlessly disturb your mind.Product Details
Price
$14.95
Publisher
New Directions Publishing Corporation
Publish Date
July 25, 2017
Pages
128
Dimensions
4.9 X 6.9 X 0.4 inches | 0.25 pounds
Language
English
Type
Paperback
EAN/UPC
9780811225984
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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).
Gini Alhadeff won the 2018 Florio Prize for her translation of Fleur Jaeggy's I am the Brother of XX.
Reviews
A wonderful, brilliant, savage writer.--Susan Sontag
Nothing rivals its intensity.--The Los Angeles Review of Books
Startling and original--so disturbing and so haunting.--Cathleen Schine
Fleur Jaeggy's pen is an engraver's needle depicting roots, twigs, and branches of the tree of madness--extraordinary.--Joseph Brodsky
This book is twisted and hypnotizing and, somehow, downright lovely. Reading it is not unlike diving naked and headlong into a bramble of black rosebushes, so intrigued you are by their beauty: it's a swift, prickly undertaking, and you emerge the other end bloodied all over.--Daniel Johnson
Finely distilled and evocative stories.
Jaeggy's astute compression of narrative detail is at once serene and startling. Beneath a placid, opalescent surface lurks a threat or violence that may or may not be realized, but which contributes to the profound impression that people and their lives are unpredictable, coursing with icy, barren wildness.
Stark, surprising prose. It's hard to capture in a line or two the strange precision of Jaeggy's prose. Darkness seems never far away.-- (11/03/2017)
Jaeggy seems to have crushed a glass in her palm and tweezed out a few shards for the page. Her prose is indeed extraordinary...it is also frightening.-- (11/08/2017)
Jaeggy's prose gleams like cut gems.--Tess Lewis (12/06/2018)
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.--Claire Kohda Hazelton"I Am the Brother of XX by Fleur Jaeggy review - otherworldly short stories" (07/15/2017)
Nothing rivals its intensity.--The Los Angeles Review of Books
Startling and original--so disturbing and so haunting.--Cathleen Schine
Fleur Jaeggy's pen is an engraver's needle depicting roots, twigs, and branches of the tree of madness--extraordinary.--Joseph Brodsky
This book is twisted and hypnotizing and, somehow, downright lovely. Reading it is not unlike diving naked and headlong into a bramble of black rosebushes, so intrigued you are by their beauty: it's a swift, prickly undertaking, and you emerge the other end bloodied all over.--Daniel Johnson
Finely distilled and evocative stories.
Jaeggy's astute compression of narrative detail is at once serene and startling. Beneath a placid, opalescent surface lurks a threat or violence that may or may not be realized, but which contributes to the profound impression that people and their lives are unpredictable, coursing with icy, barren wildness.
Stark, surprising prose. It's hard to capture in a line or two the strange precision of Jaeggy's prose. Darkness seems never far away.-- (11/03/2017)
Jaeggy seems to have crushed a glass in her palm and tweezed out a few shards for the page. Her prose is indeed extraordinary...it is also frightening.-- (11/08/2017)
Jaeggy's prose gleams like cut gems.--Tess Lewis (12/06/2018)
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.--Claire Kohda Hazelton"I Am the Brother of XX by Fleur Jaeggy review - otherworldly short stories" (07/15/2017)
