Water Statues

Family, obsession, and privilege boiled down by the icy-hot Swiss-Italian master stylist Fleur JaeggyEven among Fleur Jaeggys singular and intricate works, The Water Statues is a shiningly peculiar book. Concerned with loneliness and wealths 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 villas flooded basement, where memories shiver in uncertain light and the waters run off to the sea.Dedicated to Ingeborg Bachmann and fleshed out with Jaeggys austere yet voluptuous style, The Water Statueswith its band of deracinated, loosely related souls (milling about as often in the distant past as in the mansions garden full of intoxicated snails)delivers like a slap an indelible picture of the swampiness of family life.