I Am the Brother of XX [Paperback]

Fleur Jaeggy is often noted for her terse and telegraphic style, which somehow brews up a profound paradox that seems bent on haunting the reader: despite a sort of zero-at-the-bone baseline, her fiction is weirdly also incredibly moving. How does she do it? No one knows. But here, in her newest collection,As concentrated as bullets, new stories by the inimitable Fleur Jaeggy Finely distilled and evocative stories. Jaeggy is a master of the short form; her essays are charged with a nearly combustible vitality, her stories without fail are compact and devastating. Long after the pleasure of reading is over, their little hooks tug at  what is it, the heart or the mind? Jaeggy's astute compression of narrative detail is at once serene and startling. Beneath a placid, opalescent surface lurks a threat or 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. Swiss-ItalianJaeggy, a master of the short form, again creates somethingunforgettable with these otherworldly stories, translated by GiniAlhadeff. They frame haunting, dreamlike moments: a 13th-century womansenses the taste of Christs foreskin &?tender as egg skin andvery?sweet; an orphan burns alive the?aristocrat who took her in forthe blasted glory of it; a family is cursed by a possessed mandrakeroot. Told in Jaeggys characteristically jagged prose, these darkstories of madness, loss and murder are urgent and evocative. Central toeach are surreal images reminiscent of?paintings by Leonora Carringtonor Max Ernst: her hands, like the claws of a crustacean, clutched at alittle mound of dust. This is an?intensely beautiful and originalcollection that bristles with a strange and often disturbing magic. The fictional stories [of Startling and originalso disturbing and so haunting. Stark, surprising prose. Its hard to capture in a line or two the strange precision of Jaeggys prose. DarklS8