New Directions is proud to present Fleur Jaeggy's strange and
mesmerizing essays about the writers Thomas De Quincey, John Keats, and
Marcel Schwob. A renowned stylist of hyper-brevity in fiction, Fleur
Jaeggy proves herself an even more concise master of the essay form,
albeit in a most peculiar and lapidary poetic vein. Of De Quincey's
early nineteenth-century world we hear of the habits of writers: Charles
Lamb "spoke of 'Lilliputian rabbits' when eating frog fricassse"; Henry
Fuseli "ate a diet of raw meat in order to obtain splendid dreams";
"Hazlitt was perceptive about musculature and boxers"; and "Wordsworth
used a buttery knife to cut the pages of a first-edition Burke." In a
book of "blue devils" and night visions, the Keats essay opens: "In
1803, the guillotine was a common child's toy." And poor Schwob's end
comes as he feels "like a 'dog cut open alive'" "His face colored
slightly, turning into a mask of gold. His eyes stayed open imperiously.
No one could shut his eyelids. The room smoked of grief." Fleur Jaeggy's
essays--or are they prose poems?--smoke of necessity: the pages are on
fire.