Paul Fulcher's Reviews > Proleterka

Parents are not necessary. Few things are necessary

My first experience of Fleur Jaeggy wasn't entirely a success. In my review of I Am the Brother of XX, I commented that she was "clearly a wonderful talented writer, but this type of abstract short story isn't really to my taste."

Well connected in literary circles - acquainted with Thomas Bernhard, Italo Calvino, Ingeborg Bachmann (a strong friend) and Roberto Calasso (who she married) - the Swiss-born Italian speaking Jaeggy has a Elena Ferrante-like attitude to the role of the author. From I think the only interview she has given available in English:

Interviewer: Silence is omnipresent in your work; it’s the dense, cohesive medium of your stories, like highly leaded glass. In your stories, pervasive quietness is often cruel, brutal. A breeding ground for violence – and creativity?

FJ I believe you can almost write without me. Once I have finished a book, it doesn’t count any more; I don’t want anything to do with it any more. A little idea occurs to me now: about ten years ago I was in Germany, near Berlin, for a few months, and there I had a good friend – a swan. His name was Erich. I called him from my window, “Erich! Erich!” And he came. We took long walks together. This swan is very important to me. There were other people around, but he knew when I would get up, and he would come out of the water to see me. One time, someone in the park asked me, “Is this your swan?” In the winter, he swam under the ice.

I'm pleased to report that Proleterka, a more conventional novella if still stylistically distinctive, was more of a success for me, the influence of Bernhard more obvious in this (seemingly partly autobiographical) story of dysfunctional families.

Proleterka was translated by Alastair McEwen from the 2001 original of the same name, and was originally published in English in the US by New Directions (as as S. S. Proleterka) in 2003, but in 2019 has been published in the UK (under the more correct title) by And Other Stories.

It is also the second book in the new Republic of Consciousness Prize bookclub which curates some of the finest fiction from small independent presses in the UK and Ireland and helps raise funds for this wonderful literary prize. See https://www.republicofconsciousness.c... and https://www.patreon.com/republicofcon...

The novella has the now middle-aged narrator look back on a a Mediterranean cruise taken when she was 15 with her father, Johannes, on board a Yugoslavian liner chartered by the Zurich-based guild of which he is a member. Her Italian mother and father divorced when she was young, and when her father's family suffered financial ruin she was sent to live with her maternal grandmother, who in turn sent her to boarding school, her father granted only very limited access. This two-week trip, a rare exception to the rule of their enforced separation, is the longest time they have spent together for years, yet 'Johannes daughter' (as she often refers to herself in the third person) spends the trip exploring her emerging sexuality with various of the crew, rather than re-bonding with her father.

Children lose interest in their parents when they are left. They are not sentimental. They are passionate and cold. In a certain sense some people abandon afections, sentiments, as if they were things. With determination, without sorrow. They become strangers. Sometimes enemies. They are no longer creatures that have been abandoned, but those who mentally beat a retreat. And they go away. Toward a gloomy, fantastic, and wretched world. Yet at times they feign happiness. Like funambulists, they practice. Parents are not necessary. Few things are necessary. Some children look after themselves. The heart, incorruptible crystal. They learn to pretend. And pretence becomes the most active, the realest part, alluring as dreams. It takes the place of what we think is real. Perhaps that is all there is to it, some children have the gift of detachment.
(from an extract at And Other Stories's website)

A striking and powerful novella. 4 stars

See also:

A review in 3:am Magazine published in conjunction with the Republic of Consciousness book club

A profile of the author and her work in the New Yorker

This excellent review by Joseph Schreiber on his roughghosts blog