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Family, obsession, and privilege boiled down by the icy-hot Swiss-Italian master stylist Fleur Jaeggy Even among Fleur 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. Dedicated to Ingeborg Bachmann and fleshed out with Jaeggy�s austere yet voluptuous style, The Water Statues�with its band of deracinated, loosely related souls (milling about as often in the distant past as in the mansion�s garden full of intoxicated snails)�delivers like a slap an indelible picture of the swampiness of family life. (less)

Family, obsession, and privilege boiled down by the icy-hot Swiss-Italian master stylist Fleur Jaeggy Even among Fleur Jaeggy�s singular and intricate works, The Water Statues is a shiningly peculiar book. Concerned with loneliness (…more)