Book Review: Sweet Days of Discipline
Fleur Jaeggy’s Masterpiece of Queer Subtext and Emotional Control
“You can’t help but take walks in the Appenzell. If you look at the small white-framed windows and the busy, fiery flowers on the sills, 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.”
I picked up Fleur Jaeggy’s Sweet Days of Discipline in the middle of a reading slump, hoping for a quick and easy fix. At just 101 pages, it seemed like the perfect palate cleanser, something slight, not too demanding, maybe even forgettable. Boy, was I wrong. This book is a razor in velvet, a fever dream that left me reeling. It’s been 4 years since I first read it, and I haven’t been able to stop thinking about it.
There’s barely a plot to speak of: Set in the 1950s within the austere walls of the Bausler Institut Boarding School in the Swiss Appenzell (the same region where Robert Walser took his final, fatal walk in the snow), arrives a fourteen-year-old girl. She is quiet, watchful, almost ghostly, drifting through the regimented days and chilly routines. Into her world arrives Frédérique, a new girl with an icy self-possession and a kind of magnetic aloofness that immediately unsettles the narrator. What follows is less a story than a series of moods — obsession, longing, confusion, and a strange, almost holy kind of discipline.
“Even now, I can’t bring myself to say I was in love with Frédérique.”
What really makes this book unforgettable is the relationship between the narrator and Frédérique. It’s not friendship, not exactly. It’s not romance, either, though there’s a current of longing running just below the surface, electric and unspoken. The narrator is obsessed with Frédérique, but not in any way that’s easy to explain. She wants to conquer her, to possess her, to be her. There’s admiration, envy, desire, and a kind of desperate need for recognition — all tangled up together. At times, the narrator seems to want to disappear into Frédérique, or to make Frédérique disappear into her. The boundaries between them blur in ways that are both thrilling and unsettling.
“I must conquer her, she must admire me.”
The queer undertones are unmistakable, but Jaeggy never names them outright. Instead, she lets the confusion and intensity of adolescent feeling speak for itself. The narrator’s fixation on Frédérique is a kind of discipline in itself, a way of imposing order on the chaos of growing up. Yet it’s also a source of pain and bewilderment — a longing that can never quite be satisfied, a mystery that can never be solved.
What’s astonishing is how Jaeggy captures all of this without ever spelling it out. She trusts the reader to feel what isn’t said, to sense the danger and beauty in every glance, every silence. The book is full of moments that feel like secrets. You read a line, and it slips under your skin, and you’re not sure why you feel so unsettled, so moved. There’s a kind of cold fire in these pages, a sense that something momentous is always about to happen, even if nothing much ever does.
“As she touched my hand and I felt hers, cold, our contact was so anatomical that the thought of flesh or sensuality eluded us.”
Reading this book was like stepping into a cold, clear lake. The prose is spare but devastating, every sentence honed to a point. Jaeggy doesn’t waste a word, and yet the book is overflowing with atmosphere: the silence of snow, the echo of footsteps in empty corridors, the smell of soap and old wood. The world of the boarding school is both suffocating and strangely beautiful, a place where time seems to stand still and the smallest gestures, folding a shirt or glancing across a table, take on immense significance.
In the end, Sweet Days of Discipline stands as a testament to the power of literary art to illuminate the darkest corners of human experience. It is a novel that demands to be read slowly, savored, and remembered. Remembered for its unflinching examination of how we learn to love and be loved in a world that often seems designed to prevent such connections from ever taking place. It remains, decades after its first publication, a haunting and beautiful exploration of the price we pay for our desires and the strange, terrible sweetness that can be found even in the most constrained circumstances.
I went in expecting a quick read and came out changed. This book lingers and makes you see the world a little differently. It’s not easy, but it’s unforgettable.
“Those years of discipline. There was a kind of elation, faint but constant throughout all those days of discipline, the sweet days of discipline.”
