Family, obsession, and privilege boiled down by the icy-hot Swiss-Italian master stylist Fleur Jaeggy. Even among Jaeggy-s singular and intricate works, The Water Statues is a shiningly peculiar book. Concerned with loneliness and wealth-s odd emotional poverty, this early novel is in part structured as a play: the dramatis personae include the various relatives, friends, and servants 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. Fleshed out with Jaeggy-s austere yet voluptuous style, The Water Statues delivers like a slap an indelible picture of the swampiness of family life. `Reading Jaeggy is not unlike diving naked and headlong into a bramble of black rose bushes, so intrigued you are by their beauty: it-s a swift, prickly undertaking, and you emerge the other end bloodied all over- -Daniel Johnson, The Paris Review
