Blair's Reviews > Sweet Days of Discipline

Sweet Days of Discipline is an inscrutable narrative – 'story' seems a completely unsuitable word – told by a teenage girl at boarding school. It seems impossible to say what it is really about. The girl describes her infatuation with a classmate named Frédérique, but there is no obvious resolution to this relationship, nor any of the others in the story. Everyone is isolated and distant and sad, even as passions among the girls rise and crash like waves. The students seem to crave death as much as sex or beauty. The prose is sparse, cold and morbid.

Sweet Days of Discipline and I Am the Brother of XX have different translators, but Jaeggy's spare style remains recognisable. As with XX, I was compelled to note down/highlight sentences and passages from the first page onwards. Jaeggy has a gift for near-contradictory phrases that stick in the mind: 'tropical stagnation', 'thwarted luxuriance', 'cheerful vendetta', 'funereal fervour'.

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You can't help but take walks in the Appenzell. If you look at the small white-framed windows and the busy, fiery flowers on the sills, you get this sense of tropical stagnation, a thwarted luxuriance, you have the feeling that inside something serenely gloomy and a little sick is going on. It's an Arcadia of sickness. Inside, it seems, in the brightness in there, is the peace and perfection of death, a rejoicing of whitewash and flowers.

I was looking for solitude, and perhaps the absolute.

We retire to our rooms; we saw life pass by beneath our windows, observed it in books and on our walks, watched the seasons change. It was always a reflection, a reflection that seemed to freeze on our windowsills... We imagined the world. What else can we imagine now if not our own deaths? The bell rings and it's all over.

Fleetingly, as she was speaking, I thought I saw a strange light in her eyes, like the snowflakes, mad and pointless, hanging still in the air. I was afraid, I wanted to tell her to save herself, but I didn't know from what.

The school was cloaked in a subterranean wind, life was rotting, or regenerating itself.

Up on the hill I was in a state you might describe as 'ill-happiness'. A state that required solitude, a state of exhilaration and quiet selfishness, a cheerful vendetta.

I had fun with Micheline, even if her cheerfulness and her daddy were boring me, but you can enjoy a fatuous cheerfulness despite the boredom, a funereal fervour.

I went back to the school and spent my time with my misery, which is a way like any other of spending time.

There's a breath of resurrection in the air, murder transformed into a state of grace.

Her beauty has become a parody. The old face is already sketched out in the young... the way some babies are scarcely born before they're reminding you of the grandparent who just died.

Micheline's dress was lace and silk and seemed to be have been cut from time itself, so well suited was it for the ball and, Micheline fantasised, for her death bed... What are the girls thinking of? At least half are nostalgic for death, and for a temple, and for all those clothes.

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