Family, obsession, and privilege boiled down by the icy-hot
Swiss-Italian master stylist Fleur Jaeggy. Even among 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.
Fleshed out with Jaeggy's austere yet voluptuous style, The Water
Statues delivers like a slap an indelible picture of the swampiness of
family life.
'Reading Jaeggy is not unlike diving naked and headlong into a bramble
of black rose bushes, so intrigued you are by their beauty: it's a
swift, prickly undertaking, and you emerge the other end bloodied all
over' -Daniel Johnson, The Paris Review
