The Water Statues

Even among Fleur Jaeggy's singular and intricate works, 'The Water Statues' is a shiningly peculiar book. Concerned with the loneliness and odd emotional poverty of wealth, 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. Dedicated to Ingeborg Bachmann and fleshed out with Jaeggy's voluptuously austere prose 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) - delivers an indelible picture of the swampiness of family life.