Fleur Jaeggy's THE WATER STATUES (Tr by Gini Alhadeff)

On his face had been spread as though with a spatula, an expression of peace, a sermon painted over a pale complexion. Though thin, at the core of his bones there was steel.

When a book is full of sentences like this, as Fleur Jaeggy's The Water Statues is, I wind up thinking even more about the translator than the author. I can't help but imagine Gini Alhadeff sitting and pondering each one, searching for a precise word order, an exact placement of modifying phrases and clauses, with an expression of concentration but also a slackness to her face not unlike the novella's protagonist, here.

The Water Statues, though even more compact than its page count might indicate, is densely packed with some of the most extraordinary sentences I've ever encountered, and for this reason alone is a book I would suggest to anyone because at least one of them is bound to resonate for them. So yes, the temptation to quote half of the book here is powerful, but I resist, because I don't want to rob you, reader, of the experience beyond what I already have.

The Water Statues might be an account of a young man, Beeklam, wondering why he can't grieve as his father does for his recently deceased mother, but then again it might be an account of that same person but as an old man, Beeklam, who is regretting the sale of his three best statues, one of which someone at some point had named after Beeklam's dead mother. Why not both, you might ask, to which I would reply, not this time. This book is like one of those weird plastic holograms we used to see all the time that contained two completely different images but only showed one at a time, depending on how light was hitting it. The old man, Beeklam, really doesn't seem like he was ever the young man, Beeklam, in the past, or vice versa. Their stories just occupy this same space. 

And what a space it is. Beeklam lives in Amsterdam in a house near the water with a flooded basement full of statues. A 21st century reader can't help but be reminded of Susanna Clarke's magnificent Piranesi, though this space is small and confined, with no tides washing through to freshen the waters and bring sea life to its rooms. Beeklam has deliberately caused this out of a desire to live like one who has drowned. 

Yes, it's all very strange, the more so for a static, dreamlike quality that would feel to have leaked over from something like J.G. Ballard's The Drowned World but for the habit of The Water Statues' characters to soliloquize as though a proscenium arch has just appeared above them, a quality all this novella's own.

I have read stranger books, even just this year, but none of them have made me feel quite as unmoored as this one