The Water Statues

Family, obsession, & privilege boiled down by the icy-hot Swiss-Italian master stylist Fleur Jaeggy

Even among Fleur Jaeggy's singular & intricate works, The Water Statues is a shiningly peculiar book. Concerned with loneliness & wealth's odd emotional poverty, this early novel is in part structured as a play: the dramatist's personae include the various relatives, friends, & 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 & 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.