Publisher's Synopsis
‘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.’ Martin Riker, New York Times
Family, obsession, and privilege boiled down by the icy-hot Swiss-Italian master stylist Fleur Jaeggy.
Even among Fleur Jaeggy's singular and intricate works, The Water Statues is a shiningly peculiar book. Concerned with loneliness and wealth's odd emotional poverty, this early novel is in part structured as a play: the dramatis personae include the various relatives, friends, and servants of a man named Beeklam, a wealthy recluse who keeps statues in his villa's flooded basement, where memories shiver in uncertain light and the waters run off to the sea. Dedicated to Ingeborg Bachmann and fleshed out with Jaeggy's austere yet voluptuous style, The Water Statues-with its band of deracinated, loosely related souls (milling about as often in the distant past as in the mansion's garden full of intoxicated snails)-delivers like a slap an indelible picture of the swampiness of family life.
‘It is hard not to be impressed by Jaeggy’s own spiritual and aesthetic grandeur, which casts her stories in such a compellingly cool light. She, too, has a startling ability to go beyond: beyond the sentimental heart, the writerly niceties, the conventions that bind us, and the messy effusions of contemporary life. She once said, in an interview, “One should be in one’s own void. Void is silence. Solitude. An absence of relationships. . . . The void is a plant that must continually be watered.” It is our good fortune that she sits at her swamp-green typewriter, watering it.’ Sheila Heti, The New Yorker
