Description

Even among Fleur Jaeggy s singular and intricate works, The Water Statues is a shiningly peculiar book. Concerned with wealth s loneliness and odd emotional poverty, this early novel is in part structured as a play: the dramatis personae include the various relatives, friends, and servants of a man named Beeklam, a wealthy recluse who keeps statues in his villa s flooded basement, where memories shiver in uncertain light and the waters run off to the sea. Dedicated to Ingeborg Bachmann and fleshed out with Jaeggy s austere yet voluptuous style, The Water Statues-with its band of deracinated, loosely related souls (milling about as often in the distant past as in the mansion s garden full of intoxicated snails)-delivers like a slap an indelible picture of the swampiness of family life–