Literature and Music: Sunnyi Melles reads Jaeggy

Fleur Jaeggy is finally being honoured in her own country with the Gottfried Keller Prize 2024. Born in Zurich and raised in various "institutes", the author now lives in Milan - her timeless work appeals to a generation of younger female writers in particular. The motif of the piano runs through her work and builds a bridge to the music of her language, as Barbara Villiger Heilig, probably the most knowledgeable expert on Fleur Jaeggy's work, will explain in the introduction. In a multi-layered examination of her Helvetian origins and Swiss authors such as Robert Walser, Fleur Jaeggy describes her dazzling experiences at a girls' boarding school in Appenzell in the novel "The Blessed Years of Chastisement" (1989), which has already become a modern classic: "It takes four hours to read," remarked the American poet Joseph Brodsky, "it takes a lifetime to remember. Fleur Jaeggy vividly explores the young women's erotically charged relationships between aggression and tenderness. At the institute, girls are disciplined "until discipline itself becomes lust". In her work, the author succeeds in capturing the existential turmoil, the ambivalence of love and the ecstasies of madness in the crystalline clarity of a language whose deep sonority emerges from mystical silence and merges with an unerring sense of rhythm. Sunnyi Melles' voice will demonstrate this unforgettably.

Translated with DeepL.com