These Possible Lives
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
Brief in the way a razor’s slice is brief, remarkable essays by a peerless stylist
New Directions is proud to present Fleur Jaeggy’s strange and mesmerizing essays about the writers Thomas De Quincey, John Keats, and Marcel Schwob. A renowned stylist of hyper-brevity in fiction, Fleur Jaeggy proves herself an even more concise master of the essay form, albeit in a most peculiar and lapidary poetic vein. Of De Quincey’s early nineteenth-century world we hear of the habits of writers: Charles Lamb “spoke of ‘Lilliputian rabbits’ when eating frog fricassse”; Henry Fuseli “ate a diet of raw meat in order to obtain splendid dreams”; “Hazlitt was perceptive about musculature and boxers”; and “Wordsworth used a buttery knife to cut the pages of a first-edition Burke.” In a book of “blue devils” and night visions, the Keats essay opens: “In 1803, the guillotine was a common child’s toy.” And poor Schwob’s end comes as he feels “like a ‘dog cut open alive’”: “His face colored slightly, turning into a mask of gold. His eyes stayed open imperiously. No one could shut his eyelids. The room smoked of grief.” Fleur Jaeggy’s essays—or are they prose poems?—smoke of necessity: the pages are on fire.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this eloquent, whimsical collection, Swiss novelist and short story writer Jaeggy (I Am the Brother of XX) flexes her nonfiction muscles. The book is compact yet expansive in its content, with three poetic essays focusing on the respective lives of three enigmatic writers Thomas De Quincey, John Keats, and Marcel Schwob. Jaeggy gracefully offers up wildly diverse anecdotes and obscure facts, going from the authors' rebellious grammar school days to the final moments before their mysterious deaths. Her narrative beautifully mimics the logic of dreams, seamlessly digressing from the main subject into unexpected territory, only to return back again. She explores the different muses, both human and inanimate, that shaped the lives and literature of these writers. Of De Quincey she writes, "The flaneur was driven forward by opium-fueled theological caprices," noting wryly of some of his contemporaries, "Robert Southey experimented with laughing gas" and "Ann Radcliffe sought out huge quantities of indigestible food." With playful exaggeration, she writes, " was poor, according to W.B. Yeats, and couldn't build a Gothic castle... which inclined him instead toward the pleasures of the imagination." Each essay treats its subject matter tenderly and moves forward with the cadence of a meticulous and lyrical language.
