The Water Statues

Family, obsession, and privilege boiled down by the icy-hot Swiss-Italian master stylist Fleur Jaeggy. Even among Jaeggy’s singular and intricate works, The Water Statues is a shiningly peculiar book. Concerned with loneliness and wealth’s 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 villa’s flooded basement, where memories shiver in uncertain light and the waters run off to the sea.
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Fleshed out with Jaeggy’s austere yet voluptuous style, The Water Statues delivers like a slap an indelible picture of the swampiness of family life..