Fleur Jaeggy 译者: Gini Alhadeff
简介
Even among Fleur Jaeggy’s singular and intricate works, <em>The Water Statues</em> is a shiningly peculiar book. Concerned with loneliness and wealth’s odd emotional poverty, this early novel is in part structured as a play: the <em>dramatis personae</em> 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.<br /><br />Dedicated to Ingeborg Bachmann and fleshed out with Jaeggy’s austere yet voluptuous style, <em>The Water Statues</em>—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.