a girl picks flowers for coffins and crowns

during her solitary morning mountain walk

Fiction, 1991

What if I told you that as you are reading this, there is someone lurking right behind you. At the cusp of your right shoulder, a man is tracing your eyes as they move along the screen. The sense of unease that such a situation might prompt is the experience of reading Sweet Days of Discipline. 

We are introduced to an unnamed character (referred to as Miss X) studying at a boarding school nestled in the Appenzell mountains in Switzerland. The days are tedious, the girls are mostly dull, and the scenery is too idyllic to learn anything in a classroom. Every morning, she wakes up at 5 a.m. to go on a long walk alone for her “appointment with Nature”. Told in the past tense, it is clear that this is a period of significance. The question we have to ask is, why? The real wizardry of this novel is Jaeggy’s writing. It feels simultaneously impervious and all-knowing, strict but rambling. The prose is so dark that it feels like midnight when you are reading. For example, on the first page itself, we are graced with gems such as “you get this sense of tropical stagnation, a thwarted luxuriance, you have the feeling that inside something serenely gloomy and a little sick is going on. It’s an Arcadia of sickness.” 

Eventually, a girl named Frederique comes to study. She piques the interest, adoration, and then obsession of Miss X. Internal turmoil ensues. It captures perfectly the fixation that girls have on each other; a need to be loved by that person, but more strongly, to be that person. It is a feeling that in hindsight, is first love. 

Film - Call Me By Your Name (with extended focus on the scenes of trees, and the last shot of Elio crying by the fire)

Song - Garden Song by Phoebe Bridgers (listen to it with headphones so that you too can revel in the thrill of hearing a creepy man sing behind Bridgers through the chorus!)

Bonus - There is a fantastic article by the cover designer of the novel (I have the old design) and a sweet but sparse interview with Fleur Jaeggy by the New Yorker. In it, she mourns a swan she befriended.