Fleur Jaeggy’s impenetrable and affecting new novel (translated from the Italian by Gini Alhadeff) willfully resists synopsis. The text flows in a non-linear fashion between passages that often read like prose-poems as much as narrative scenes, interspersed with brief dramatic dialogue. Ostensibly the book is about a cast of children in the orbit of a wealthy man who keeps statues in his flooded basement. But the opaque and fragmentary narrative feels more like a dream, stripped of whimsy. Attempts to write about this novel feel similarly fraught — akin to recounting a dream, dense with crystalline and bone-deep truths. Once one tries to relay them, however, the clarity of the dream recedes and one is left feeling adrift. 

To a degree, Jaeggy’s elusive language recalls the despair voiced by her close friend, the poet Ingeborg Bachmann, to whom The Water Statues is dedicated: “It’s otherwise, believe me. / Between a word and a thing / you only encounter yourself, / lying between each as if next to someone ill, / never able to get to either, / tasting a sound and a body, / and relishing both. // It tastes of death.” Jaeggy, like Bachmann, favors the improbable combustion of experience: a “winter day” that is “livid” rather than petrified. The titular statues — perpetually cold, created by a progressive, incremental process of carving away at the original body of marble — to which we are introduced in the excerpt below, live in Beeklam’s flooded basement. These statues are surrounded by perpetual cycles of freeze, thaw, and flow, not unlike the personas that populate the novel. Throughout, Jaeggy emphasizes directional relations — up and down, the flooded basement, a sprawling garden, the street — but the mood and emotions feel flattened, compressed. The statues function as uncanny stand-ins for people, at once animated and unyielding, much like the many references to snow, frost, and freezing.

Throughout, Jaeggy combines the sensate immersion in the world, unmitigated by self-awareness or social mores, with a jagged, profoundly affect-less subjectivity. Notably, she invokes sound in surprising and evocative ways, as when one of the young girls, Katrin, sums up the desolate loneliness of a mundane school lunch with the observation: “An irritating sound of forks and knives cloaked the porridge in martial bleakness.” The personas in The Water Statues are never able to “get to” anything, not even a true encounter with themselves. In this cold, sunken world, everything tastes of death, and none of them, Beeklam included, feel impelled to do anything other than “rejoice” that “his life was passing, had passed.” As Sheila Heti observes in a New Yorker profile from 2017: “For Jaeggy, dying is the sincerest way of being in relation to others.”

—Caitlin Woolsey

from The Water Statues
Translated from the Italian by Gini Alhadeff

Following a blind alley in Amsterdam, not far from the harbor, one reaches a dark stone building almost unwittingly. Metal screens clatter on the windows. The front gate is always open. White porcelain tiles cover the floor of the entrance; propped up by the mighty, almost black stone arms of two broken sirens, its vault holds the open eye of a window. Stumps of other arms are scattered across the ceiling. Little remains of the pink flesh color, some of the cobalt blue, and a few gold stars. It was once a sky. This is where Beeklam lived.

   BEEKLAM: Shut the doors.
VICTOR: They are double doors and they are shut.
BEEKLAM: So what’s that light filtering in endlessly?
VICTOR: There are cracks.
BEEKLAM: Well, block them off. 

“The cracks,” Beeklam repeated, raising his head by about three finger widths, “or untimely passersby. Yesterday they were down by the wall, standing stiff, with black sashes at their waists and a positive look in their eyes. Were they meditating? Our orbs clashed. I’d lowered my gaze heavily. When I opened my eyes again, I saw them crouching over the magnolias. I went up to the window: they had pointed beards that stood out against white ruff collars.” 

“Thank you,” I said in a falsetto, clearing my throat, and on tiptoe: “Call me a thief, a thief of ceremonies.” My words were met by a rustling of fibers.

Sometimes one meets people who look distracted, they don’t seem to care about anything; they don’t look at people passing by, not at the men or at the women; they walk along in a dream, their pockets empty, their gaze empty of thought, yet they are the most passionate people on earth: collectors. Beeklam was one of them. He lived in the basement of his large house which was filled with statues, most of them commemorative effigies — a lapidary presence stretching practically all the way down to the sea. Because his basement, like the sewers, went down to the water. 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. No one shooed him away when he rested his head on the wall and waited — perhaps for the statues of water to return, or to summon him. The child now wished to live as though he’d drowned. But he heard rising up from the sewers the rustling sleep of serpents. No one shooed him away because he was quite alone.

He’d abandoned his newly widowed father to go and “buy statues,” he said, and it was as if he were joking. From early childhood, he’d been drawn to figurative imitations of grief and stillness; from childhood he’d been a collector, museums were in him; statues were his playthings, a privilege of all who are born lost and start out from where they end. The child looked at them: he inspected eyelids and napes, drawn into their definitive dimensions of seriousness, some molded by artists of renown, others by unknown workshops. He had a name for each: Rosalind, Diane, Magdalena, Thelma, Gertrud. Those statues with their often amiable faces disclosed the things that dwell in things themselves, vitreous things.

He thought of his father, Reginald, again: of his father’s clothes, his obsession with the cold, his seemingly absent, unfocused eyes, and of the term “passed” which he pronounced serenely. “She simply passed before us,” Reginald would say of his wife.

But one day the solitary child, his hair ash-colored, ran out of the basement, and stopped before a garden: the sun was going down and drawing a leaden oval mirror over the trees; it seemed to him that the death rattle of eternity resounded between sundown and the night; for the first time he felt buoyed, for the first time he felt as though something was lasting too long — the solar ring had not yet vanished. It’s so easy to admire it, it’s the last fantasy nature indulges in, it’s all color, on fire. Yes, the sun is disintegrating, a squalid pretender to the glory of that Void denied to any who might mention its name or cling to it. It was as though it were saying, “True life is beyond words.” Beeklam was surprised to be talking about the sun. A gentleman, meanwhile, whom Beeklam had not failed to spot, all dressed in dark clothes with a white band at the neck, was walking in the garden, as though, after having named every single tree, he’d just let go of Emily Brontë’s arm. And now he was tired. He sits on a bench. The geometric flower beds, in the dusk, are dull, the weeds are limp, and a single flower stoops with heroic élan. At that instant the person sitting looks at his watch — and gets up. That man is certainly not interested in company, Beeklam thought: company is tiring, unlike flowers that punctually put an end to the day. And yet, what could have been holding Beeklam back if not a need for company, and for quiet, but that person seems in every way bent on fleeing the only other person present; he has now approached the gate and pulls it shut, snapping its iron padlock. At that moment Beeklam, for no reason on earth, felt he had found a friend; and maybe — he told himself — it would be forever.

“When I was a gardener at the botanical gardens,” Victor recounts, “I went in search of memories among the plants: soon it will snow, I thought — and my shovel was already covered in snow. But soon, too, I came out of winter. I locked the gate with the padlock. It’s closed, I told a passerby. Imitating a middle-aged man, a boy dressed in dark clothes, with a flower in his buttonhole and a pencil in his breast pocket, asked me simply if I wanted to be his servant. And here, at the botanical gardens, I asked, is where you come looking for servants? The boy half grimaced, then without moving his lips said, ‘Your ears, sir. The immense contours of your ears, lit by the lamppost, caught my attention. High and slanted, slowly they went from shadow to lacy light, and from light to shadow; I waited to see who bore that head — the head that wasn’t there. You should know that at all times I live among my statues, and by now all that’s left for me to look for in the course of my excursions through time is the head of my look-alike.’”

BEEKLAM: In my basements humidity flows everywhere — it’s almost as though the irrigated statues were walking about aimlessly, like wading birds, sinking toward darkness, falling below the horizon; but that’s just an effect of the watery light, and of my impatience perhaps. I’ve found it hard sometimes to turn my back on the natural call of the waves, and I don’t envy the temperament of vultures or of stars. The blinds at my windows have been fluttering for fifty years. My city is Amsterdam, where water flows without a true end in sight, and I’ve had bloody judicial disputes to do with water, but I won’t stray here onto legal grounds.

BEEKLAM: I’ve spent a great deal of time in these basements, not that I was weary of the sun, of the open air: I was simply losing control of the hours and of life, so to speak; I was renouncing the rigid definitions of daily life that allow one to succumb to natural heat or to simply depend on the sun and the elements; I was lying down or standing up, or just leaning against a wall in those dank rooms, the dormitories in which my merchandise wandered about briskly, their gaze directed upward, at the bars. Amidst shovels, trophies, discarded shards of marble, my clay guests weave spools of sleep as fine as Malines lace — they sail over the walls, bouncing up like rubber on the dusty steps, rising high toward the light — though they rise in vain, arriving at nothing, not even at beatitude or the depletion of despair. And, as in fairy tales, I went back up, laden with the years.

BEEKLAM: Far away, and beyond my actual dwelling, floated a great wooden carcass — a ship, its sails unfurled — that looked like a dark giant wrapped in a voluminous crimson cape. Could it be the Flying Dutchman, answering the call of our professional mourners? That sinuous crimson color lured me out of the house. I, too, needed to take a walk. It was late spring, the nightingales gayly warbled their long-repressed ecstasies. I was so happy I inadvertently caught my own reflection in a polished wall, polished by fine weather, my eye smiled in the spring light, and that light was reflected in a passerby’s smiling pupil. Together we took the same road, and together we sat on a bench by the harbor. Who had chosen that bench? Him or me? I was already vexed that he wore gold earrings. The crushed debris of this harbor in the springtime has the most agreeable resemblance to toys; I never tire of looking at the buckets on the cranes, and at all that heavy matter turning into light loads running along on wires. A scent of celery settled over me. Here in Amsterdam the way fish is displayed is so considerate, but the garlic isn’t very white.

I was thinking I should get up from the bench and leave that boy. I had, for the past quarter of an hour, been subjected, and not for the first time — the previous one had lasted almost fifty years — to some interruptions. The boy’s smile hadn’t yet left his face, and another light shone on it now, who knows why the face had already changed. That sequence of expressions took on an aggressive tinge: I had become too accustomed to all that is durable, absent; to the visual traits of marble and stone figures; and the life, or incarnation of life, in the past quarter of an hour, seemed to commemorate that interval, the empty space that hangs capriciously, like a rope endowed with reason, between two, not altogether convinced, people.

The boy gazed into the distance, more so than necessary, to where the boats floated, beneath a shadow.

I took advantage of his distraction to speak to him softly, so that he could barely hear me: “You know,” I said, “my friend will come to get me soon, his name is Victor, and he likes frogs. He was surprised that one could buy such beautiful creatures, beings that bend their head back as we do, displaying the underside of their chin, and the throat; so vulnerable, almost a first fruit of decomposition. With Victor I believe I experience something of the sentiments of owning a slave (I am referring, as you well know, to that age-old, pre-Alexandrian, feeling). That man belongs to me: we play together, I am happy to be in his company, though he’s sometimes in the habit of making shrewd remarks. And I’m inclined to believe that one of the most profound relationships possible lies hidden here: I am his slave as he is mine. You might agree with me that in helping another, a friend, there is a vague homicidal passion that’s hard to corral into a less murderous sentiment, but I am a little tired today after yesterday’s celebrations. (Victor had dared to recall the distant day of our first encounter — such outpourings are always rather exhausting.) Communal life ends up draining the innocence that people who live alone possess. Take you: one can see right away that you live by yourself, that you have no parents; an orphan, I thought, always possesses what we might call a theological ability to live alone, an infallible instinct for classifying people as boring. That, you must know, is something I noticed about you right away. You saw in me a boring person, and I saw that you would rather — and I honestly can’t blame you — look at all the insignificant things moving around you, here at the harbor: the cranes, the bruisers bearing crates, the officers’ uniforms . . . as though your solitude, and the fact of being an orphan, forced you, against your will perhaps, to formulate particularly accurate observations.”

The pleasure of still finding himself next to the boy was gone and he felt, even as he spoke, as if that pleasure had been a small trace, left years earlier, of himself. When he saw the boy finally walk away, that was something to be recalled with pleasure, and as a dedicated spectator he watched the sailors go by, slow and bilious.

VICTOR: We walked slowly home, bid farewell to the harbor, to the spring that was ending, to the gullets of the wooden seagulls on the railings, to the aircraft carrier whose metallic effulgence attracted more than one eye.

Next to the canal Beeklam stopped contemplating the trash disturbing the surface of the water and the minuscule ash-colored fish: those brief walks seemed to him his last, and the list of final things seemed brighter to him, more distinct, like something sinking to the bottom.

It started to rain, and the rain never stopped in the days that followed. Beeklam walked skirting the walls, everything was in motion, the reflections of trees trembled on the canals; only a Buddha he caught a glimpse of through a window sat still through that tempest of the elements.

He recognized it, he had given that Buddha to X even before he’d gone to live in the basements. Some faces, in a crowd of child flaneurs, can be unsettling, and they remain suspended there a long time. Then little by little they fade, as though erased by a limp flannel hand. X had been an athlete and an eccentric before putting on weight. He’d grown fat around the age of fifteen, but they’d been done with one another just in time.

He walked on, saw more decorated rooms, people sitting reading the newspaper; the windows of houses proved to him how very quiet the lives of others could be, how pleasant it is to be in an armchair and to hear the patter of rain on glass panes. He was once again persuaded that his life was passing, had passed, and this made him rejoice while admiring the efforts of his fellow creatures, of the Dutch population with their firmness regarding the radiant pinnacles of domestic comfort — such home-sweet-home settings made his heart sink, so much happiness he was happier living without.

The Water Statues by Fleur Jaeggy, translated from the Italian by Gini Alhadeff,
is published by New Directions and available now.

Caitlin Woolsey is a poet and art historian, who specializes in the historical confluence of visual art, performance, and media in the twentieth century. She is the Assistant Director of the Research and Academic Program at the Clark Art Institute, and teaches in the Williams Graduate Program in the History of Art.

The author of The Sun at Midday and Diary of a Djinn, Gini Alhadeff won the 2018 Florio Prize for her translation of Jaeggy’s I am the Brother of XX.