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These possible lives / Fleur Jaeggy ; translated by Minna Zallman Proctor.

by Jaeggy, Fleur, author.

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New York : New Directions Publishing Corporation, 2017.

De Quincey, Thomas, 1785-1859.

Keats, John, 1795-1821.

Schwob, Marcel, 1867-1905.

9780811226875 (paperback acid-free paper) :

0811226875 (paperback acid-free paper)

60 pages ; 18 cm

Thomas De Quincey -- John Keats -- Marcel Schwob.

New Directions is proud to present Fleur Jaeggy's strange and mesmerizing essays about the writers Thomas De Quincey, John Keats, and Marcel Schwob. A renowned stylist of hyper-brevity in fiction, Fleur Jaeggy proves herself an even more concise master of the essay form, albeit in a most peculiar and lapidary poetic vein. Of De Quincey's early nineteenth-century world we hear of the habits of writers: Charles Lamb "spoke of 'Lilliputian rabbits' when eating frog fricassse"; Henry Fuseli "ate a diet of raw meat in order to obtain splendid dreams"; "Hazlitt was perceptive about musculature and boxers"; and "Wordsworth used a buttery knife to cut the pages of a first-edition Burke." In a book of "blue devils" and night visions, the Keats essay opens: "In 1803, the guillotine was a common child's toy." And poor Schwob's end comes as he feels "like a 'dog cut open alive'": "His face colored slightly, turning into a mask of gold. His eyes stayed open imperiously. No one could shut his eyelids. The room smoked of grief." Fleur Jaeggy's essays--or are they prose poems?--smoke of necessity: the pages are on fire. -

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