Children who grow up in the country know about death; they can, in a manner of speaking, see their own bones out the window, in the frugal garden plots.
THESE POSSIBLE LIVES by Fleur Jaeggy is barely a book. Maybe sixty pages? Three essays. But I fell in love with her weird writing a while back.
Around 160 BCE, the playwright Terence is supposed to have said “nothing is said that has not been said before.” You’ve heard it as “there are no new stories” or similar. That should not stop anyone, and it shouldn’t stop anyone from reaching for some new sound in prose.
Cloaked in a driver’s mantle, some legal papers, and frost, Thomas surprised his shoes and went skating down the street, coasting to a stop on the corner of Oxford Street in front of his little friend Ann.
He surprised his shoes! There’s a whole page of narrative in those four words. This is why Jaeggy fascinates me. She concentrates her prose. People call her minimal or even clinical, but she has this way of cooking down and reduces what could be an acre of prose into a few charged sentences.
When you work in genre, you’re not supposed to care too much about what’s often called “sentence-by-sentence” writing. The beautiful sentence is considered entirely secondary to clarity and propulsiveness. I always disliked that, to be honest. It’s interesting to try a pared-down genre style from time to time, and the people who do it well are fun to read. But so much of the time it’s just people dishing out a trail of slop that’s only supposed to get you from point A to point B, and I want beautiful writing too.
Anyway. These are three essays on three dead writers, containing their entire lives in little diamonds made out of their ashes.
They said that he had been a “good sick man,” and a gracious corpse; he hadn’t wanted to trouble anyone.
The essays aren’t long, as I say, and Jaeggy’s writing appears minimal, but there is so much condensed in every line that I know I’ll be re-reading it six or seven more times.
…delighting in the sickness and horror of original matter, deposits of which could be traced back to the stars.
I love stories, but I also love writing, the multiplicity of pure tones that can still be struck, the new complexities and fresh sounds that can still be drawn out of the original matter.
THESE POSSIBLE LIVES, Fleur Jaeggy (UK) (US+)
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