Sunday book pick: An oppressive boarding school childhood in 1989 novel ‘Sweet Days of Discipline’

“I see my little companions from when I was eight years old, in bright white sheets, with their smiles, their lower eyelids; their gaze has slipped away. We shared our beds with them. In prisons too, the prisoners don’t forget their cellmates. They are faces that both fed and devoured our brains, our eyes. There is no time, at that time. Childhood is ancient.”

Swiss author Fleur Jaeggy’s Sweet Days of Discipline, originally written in Italian, was her first novel to be translated into English. Translator Tim Parks discovered the book by accident while browsing at a bookstore in Italy. Since then, Jaeggy’s slim novels have received critical acclaim and enjoyed popularity with readers.

Like a harem

Set in a boarding school in post-war Switzerland, a 14-year-old Eve, the novel’s narrator, begins the story of her childhood at the Bausler Institut in Appenzell with a death. The heavy blanket of snow and a dead man buried in it create a sordid picture – not at all in keeping with the sometimes happy memories of school life. An all-girls boarding school, the Institut enforces strict discipline on all boarders, including the teachers and the staff. Even in this stifling atmosphere, favourites and pets emerge, imbuing the air with a sexual thrill. “A boarding school is like a harem,” muses the child narrator.

Eve’s melancholic existence in the boarding school is enlivened by Frédérique’s arrival. Only a few months older than Eve, Frédérique displays maturity way beyond her years and seems to demand infatuation and devotion from her peers. The narrator falls in love with Frédérique and continues to be long after she’s done with school; however, she thinks it unwise to confess her love. In the harem-like quarters of the boarding school, full of puberty-afflicted girls with no outlet, sexual envy is the most cherished feeling.

Perhaps it is the war or an early encouragement of self-reliance, the novel throbs with desolation and gloom. Frédérique, who remains aloof from the narrator’s passion, evokes serious feelings of self-pity and desperation. This in turn makes the narrator observe her German roommate more closely, her delicate femininity and her still-childish ways. The narrator is sick with “ill-happiness”, which is exacerbated by her solitude and exhilaration.

A boarder since she was eight years old, the narrator cannot wait to step into the real world, a desire heightened by Frédérique, who, with her knowledge of literature, philosophy, and travel, seems more worldly and wise than anyone else in the Institut. It becomes Eve’s personal mission to “conquer” Frédérique.

The fact that she is not academically gifted or very charming is not a deterrent. At 14, the narrator is drawn to Baudelaire and feels herself acknowledged in his dark, poetic confessions. When destiny finally brings Frédérique’s friendship, the reader sees Eve’s feelings for what they are – obsessive, brittle, devastating.

Cold and austere

As is often the case with juvenile love, the narrator gets embroiled in mind games that no one except her is aware of. When Micheline, another new student, arrives, the narrator withdraws her affections from Frédérique, punishing her for resisting her infatuation. While Frédérique remains oblivious to this manoeuvre, it is Eve who suffers the consequences of her own coldness.

Jaeggy’s prose is cool and austere, much like the snow-laced Appenzell where the story unfolds. The boarding school – chaste on the outside, sickly inside – is conducive to the cruelty of its every resident. The girls treat one another callously while teachers lavish affection only on a chosen few. The effect of these rugged associations is such that it consumes time, overlapping the past and the present, ensnaring everyone who has lived it. The future, which arrives almost immediately, brings a reconciliation between the narrator and Frédérique – and a revelation that is far more tragic than their unhappy childhood.

Sweet Days of Discipline reminded me greatly of the 1931 German movie Mädchen in Uniform, where, too, a bunch of girls go through a rush of confusing, adolescent emotions and are overcome by first flushes of obsession within the walls of a hostile, unwelcoming boarding school. A perfect companion watch to Jaeggy’s astounding novel.

Sweet Days of Discipline, Fleur Jaeggy, translated from the Italian by Tim Parks, And Other Stories.