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.