Last Vanities: Stories - Fleur Jaeggy

A dementedly prim wife spies on her husband and is hammered to death by his paramour of the moment; a seemingly kind maid who mothers a wealthy orphan sets the house on fire; a retired couple are about to celebrate their 50th wedding anniversary when the husband throws himself out the window, or does his wife give him a little help? Set in mundane, repressed middle-class environments, these tales pivot on terrible slips off the leash. Reading time is approximately four hours. Remembering time, as for its author, the rest of one's life, said Joseph Brodsky of Fleur Jaeggy's novel, Sweet Days of Displine. Now Jaeggy has come up with seven stories, each at some deep level in dark complicity with the others, all as terse and spare as if etched with a steel tip. A brooding atmosphere of horror, a disturbing and subversive propensity for delirium haunts the violent gestures and chilly irony of these tales. Full of menace, the air they breathe is stirred only by the FÜhn, the warm west wind of the Alps that inclines otherwise respectable citizens to vent the spleen and angst of life's last vanities.