Clocking in at a sharp 101 pages, you’re finished before you can lodge a complaint, its contents going down as smoothly as a martini served in an ice-cold glass.

Violence dredged from the depths of consciousness is the most darkly glittering seam running through this world. Exhilarating.

Glorious, acerbic, and sad. I have never gasped so much in sheer literary joy as while reading this novel; just trust me. It’s exceptional.

Jaeggy’s astute compression of narrative detail is at once serene and startling. Beneath a placid, opalescent surface lurks a threat of violence that may or may not be realized, but which contributes to the profound impression that people and their lives are unpredictable, coursing with icy, barren wildness.

This short work is packed with violent premonitions, sudden deaths, stabbings, hangings and the language of insanity. There are metaphors drawn from shrouds, altar cloths, coffins, corpses, funeral marches, gallows, guillotines, nooses, cults of the dead and, most affecting of all, stone tablets set in churchyard walls. We are all dying, even as children: as Rilke believed, we carry our deaths within us. Frédérique tells the narrator she has an old woman’s hands; the schoolgirls inhabit ‘a sort of senile childhood’ and they have ‘a mortuary look.’

Jaeggy seems to have crushed a glass in her palm and tweezed out a few shards for the page. Her prose is indeed extraordinary–it is also frightening.

This novella is filled with conflicted, often dark, emotion. The tension lies not so much in what happens, as in the sombre frostiness of the prose… A tale—captured so deftly in this translation by Tim Parks—of stark, poetic beauty.

It is thrilling to live in Jaeggy’s worlds, which are so intense they threaten to boil over.

Reading Jaeggy is not unlike diving naked and headlong into a bramble of black rosebushes, so intrigued you are by their beauty: it’s a swift, prickly undertaking, and you emerge the other end bloodied all over.

Like all great books, it’s really like nothing else. It’s like itself.

Dipped in the blue ink of adolescence, Fleur Jaeggy’s pen is an engraver’s needle depicting roots, twigs, and branches of the tree of madness: Extraordinary prose. Reading time is approximately four hours. Remembering time, as for its author: the rest of one’s life.

Set in a boarding school in Switzerland and narrated by teenage Eve, this taut novel depicts the tensions and erotics of young friendship in a claustrophobic and controlling closed environment. Eve’s knowing voice unsettles us to reconstruct our own angle on existence when we were fourteen.