Meike's Reviews > Sweet Days of Discipline

In her autofictional novella, Swiss writer Jaeggy (*1940) ponders her time as a teenager in a boarding school, here set in Appenzell. The all-girls institute appears as a surreal place that locks the boarders away from life, keeping them from a achieving a bildung in the sense of the bildungsroman, so a sense of self in society. Rather, a pointless demand for obedience structures this education, and a feeling of suffocation lurks in every line: While the narrator's enigmatic father (who becomes important in Proleterka) is mainly absent, the mother directs from Brazil how the daughter should live and what she should study.

The German roommate seems to exist in her own kind of hell, but the narrator's resentment rooted in the fact that the mother insisted on her living with a German is so big that the two girls can't emotionally reach each other, they remain alone together. And then there's Frédérique: The narrator develops a crush on the girl, but her admiration leads nowhere, there is no knowledge regarding the expression of emotion. The same goes for the new girl everybody is fascinated by. The effects of a life full of stifled curiosity and repressed feeling are represented in the married couple running the institution.

Jaeggy delivers the story in her signature crisp sentences and adds a haunting atmosphere, but after I Am the Brother of XX, I was disappointed by this novella: It's too long for what it is, and I was a little bored.