Jaeggy has come up with seven stories, each at some deep level in dark
complicity with the others, all as terse and spare as if etched with a
steel tip. A brooding atmosphere of horror, a disturbing and subversive
propensity for delirium haunts the violent gestures and chilly irony of
these tales. Full of menace, the air they breathe is stirred only by the
Fohn, the warm west wind of the Alps that inclines otherwise respectable
citizens to vent the spleen and angst of life's last vanities.