Like a Washed Corpse
Jenny Turner: Fleur Jaeggy’s Method, 27 July 2023
The Water Statues
by Fleur Jaeggy, translated by Gini Alhadeff.
And Other Stories, 93 pp., £10.99, May 2022,978 1 913505 44 8 Show More
by Fleur Jaeggy, translated by Gini Alhadeff.
And Other Stories, 93 pp., £10.99, May 2022,
“... After the death of his mother, a man called Beeklam turns to collecting statues, which he keeps in the flooded basement of his house in Amsterdam. Thelma, he calls one specimen – it was his mother’s name. Others are Rosalind, Diane, Magdalena, Gertrud, after his mother’s friends. Because the basement, ‘like the sewers’, is connected to the sea, ‘it was a relief to Beeklam to know that any gap or crack would give a sense of the movement of waves: of a submerged world he believed to be populated by other statues with feet (if they still had them) tied to stones, and whose knuckles of stone knocked on his walls ... ”