Sweet Days of Discipline     by Fleur Jaeggy, Translated by T Parks Original title: Beati anni di castigo Original language: Italian Published by New Directions Publishing Corporation Pub. Date: 1993 Format: Paperback, 101 pages Dimensions: (in inches): 0.34 x 8.00 x 5.38 ISBN: 0811212351 List Price: $10.95 Buy online from Amazon.com for $10.95 Published by Heinemann Pub. Date: 1991 Pub. Place: UK Format: Hardcover, 101 pages List Price: £12.99 Not available for ordering

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This is the evocation of a self-absorbed childhood in an atmosphere bleached by memory and the passage of the years. The narrator awaits her release from a dull boarding school in which everything seems to have been programmed and pre-ordained.


It is also that irrepeatable time of life filled with first discoveries, every step taken a step nearer to what is real because in the school existence is totally subordinated to a system, a system where everything has been pre-arranged — as if it had in fact already happened. The only thing left to chance is a love to share this imprisonment with, and this book tells its story. The narrator’s love for Fréderique is the only ‘deviation’, the only individual act in a place that doesn’t provide for any freedom or rather has taken account of this too as yet another constraint, another inevitable fact.


With a distant echo of Robert Musil’s The Confessions of Young Törless the book engages the development of a rather different kind of adolescence, different from the usual differences because this is an aristocratic adolescence but no less significant for that and it is one that forever reverberates through one’s consciousness.

‘One winter afternoon — we were sitting on the stairs — Frédérique took my hands and said: «You’ve got an old woman’s hands.» Hers were cold. She turned them over: they were shrivelled up. I can hardly describe how proud I was to hear what for me was a compliment. That day, on the stairs, I knew she was attracted to me. They really were an old woman’s hands, they were bony. Frédérique’s hands were broad, thick, square, like a boy’s. Both of us wore signet rings on our little fingers. You might imagine that we found physical pleasure in touching each other like this. As she touched my hand and I felt hers, cold, our contact was so anatomical that the thought of flesh or sensuality eluded us.’ p18