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.