These Possible Lives

ISBN-13: 9780811226875 / Angielski / Miękka / 2017 / 64 str.

Fleur (New Directions) Jaeggy

Opis

New Directions is proud to present Fleur Jaeggy's strange and mesmerizing essays about the writers Thomas De Quincey, John Keats, and Marcel Schwob. A renowned stylist of hyper-brevity in fiction, Fleur Jaeggy proves herself an even more concise master of the essay form, albeit in a most peculiar and lapidary poetic vein. Of De Quincey's early nineteenth-century world we hear of the habits of writers: Charles Lamb -spoke of 'Lilliputian rabbits' when eating frog fricassse-; Henry Fuseli -ate a diet of raw meat in order to obtain splendid dreams-; -Hazlitt was perceptive about musculature and boxers-; and -Wordsworth used a buttery knife to cut the pages of a first-edition Burke.- In a book of -blue devils- and night visions, the Keats essay opens: -In 1803, the guillotine was a common child's toy.- And poor Schwob's end comes as he feels -like a 'dog cut open alive'- -His face colored slightly, turning into a mask of gold. His eyes stayed open imperiously. No one could shut his eyelids. The room smoked of grief.- Fleur Jaeggy's essays--or are they prose poems?--smoke of necessity: the pages are on fire.