Sweet Days of Discipline

A novel about obsessive love and madness set in postwar Switzerland, Fleur Jaeggy's eerily beautiful novel begins innocently enough: "At fourteen I was a boarder in a school in the Appenzell." But there is nothing innocent here. With the off-handed remorselessness of a young Eve, the narrator describes her potentially lethal designs to win the affections of Frederique, the apparently perfect new girl. In Tim Parks' consummate translation (with its "spare, haunting quality of a prose poem," TLS), Sweet Days of Discipline is a peerless, terrifying, and gorgeous work.