3.0
The Water Statues
ByPublisher Description
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.
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Meet readers like you in the Fable For You feed, designed to build bookish communitiesThe Water Statues Reviews
3.0
caro
Created about 2 months agoShare
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“enigmatic, dreamlike — you never really know the extent of the tortuous and detached atmosphere Jaeggy conjures to tell the story of a neglected child haunted by grief and a shallow emotional life.”
iz.wilson
Created about 2 months agoShare
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Acce
Created 5 months agoShare
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Millie
Created 7 months agoShare
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emma_recommends
Created 10 months agoShare
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“At just 89 pages, I sat down and read The Water Statues in a day, but I felt like I could have benefited from sitting with it much longer.
In the short novel, we meet Beeklam, a man who collects statues in a flooded basement, largely withdrawn from the outside world. In and out will float other characters, such as Katrin, a grown orphan; Lampe, a laborer who comes to work on the property; Victor, who is described as his “servant,” and “friend,” and a few animals who’s personification gives this book a moment of magic realism.
Magic realism really cannot define this novel, though, as it purposefully bends the rules of genre. At times, first-person recollections, at others, third-person omniscient explanations, this book ocellates between points of view and timelines. It was a laborious read, and I frequently caught myself returning a passage to reread and try to make out who was speaking and about whom.
While the narrative itself was disjointed, the theme was clear: loneliness. Jaeggy upholds loneliness to an almost saintly quality, and yet, Beeklam, the basement recluse, cannot seem to find himself truly alone. What exactly Jaeggy is trying to say about loneliness, I’ll have to mull on for a while…”
About Fleur Jaeggy
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).
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