Water Statues

Even among Fleur Jaeggy's intricate and prickly works, The Water Statues is a shiningly peculiar work. Concerned with the long shadows cast by family and privilege, this early novel is in part structured as a play: the dramatis personae include the various relatives, servants, and by-blows of a man named Beeklam, a wealthy recluse who keeps statues in his villa's flooded basement, where memories shiver in uncertain light and the waters run off to the sea.
Dedicated to Ingeborg Bachmann and fleshed out with Jaeggy's austere yet voluptuous style, The Water Statues -with its band of deracinated, loosely related souls (milling about as often in the distant past as in the mansion's garden full of intoxicated snails and conversing less with each other than with inert marble figures)-delivers like a slap an indelible picture of the swampiness of family life.