Fleur Jaeggy

[gveranon]

For those who like their pessimism straight...

The Austere Fiction of Fleur Jaeggy | The New Yorker

The above-linked article was originally titled "Null and Void." I wonder why the New Yorker retitled it. "Austere" seems euphemistic in this case. Anyway, after reading this article a few months ago, I was moved to order a couple of Fleur Jaeggy's books. I just started reading the collection Last Vanities and almost immediately ran across a passage that I can't resist quoting here.

"...In another room there were toys. The toys of Johanna's employers' little girl that died. No one had touched them since. Sometimes, in the evening, the mother rocked the rocking horse. You can't play with a dead child's toys. That's what her husband said. A sensible fellow, he would have liked to play with his dead daughter's dolls himself. The dolls laughed at this man and woman who couldn't forget their baby. They were still intact. The little girl hadn't had time to smash in their faces or pull off their legs or maybe an arm. It saddened the wife: this lack of wear and tear precluding renewal. Premature toys. Even the dolls' clothes were intact. Ironed. Their hair too. Lots of soft little wigs in their boxes. Blond, black, with curls even, like Johanna's. Their daughter never combed them. But perhaps she's doing it now. In her cute little grave she combs and combs their hair, like Lorelei. The wife wonders about that. But the husband said it was impossible and that she mustn't think of such things. That deep down he thinks of himself. His daughter was growing in her grave. She would have been five now. And it made no difference that it was a heap of dust doing the playing. They wouldn't have any more children. And they felt extremely pleased now to be showing their daughter's room to Marie Anne. Marie Anne looked everything over with stubborn amazement. She felt generous praising it all, she thought it would please the woman that someone was saying she had done up her dead daughter's room so well...."

--Fleur Jaeggy, "No Destiny" (from the collection Last Vanities, trans. by Tim Parks)

(Note: This passage was ripped from its fuller context. There is more to the "No Destiny" of the title than just this!)