Fleur Jaeggy would like to see herself as something of a mystic. It’s something she aspires to, she admitted in an interview last year. The word mystic derives from the Greek mustē, an “initiated person”. When re-reading Sweet Days of Discipline, arguably the Swiss Italian author’s most famous work, it’s evident that she is such a person. Jaeggy is in on a secret, reaching at something beyond our understanding. The novel from 1989, both slim and surreal, is centred around friendship at a boarding school. Set in postwar Switzerland, it follows the curious dynamics of the narrator who desires her schoolgirl companion Frédérique. The landscape is gloomy. Darkness never seems far away. There are schoolgirl crushes and physical closeness, yet the boarding school itself is a “sort of chaste promiscuity”. The narrator studies Baudelaire and reads Novalis. Surveying the natural surroundings of Appenzell, she longs for solitude and envies the world – only wishing to be living in it. She doesn’t admit to loving Frédérique, that would be too easy. She admires her discipline and her aesthetic way of living. But she is ill at ease. Her desire to conquer Frédérique, who consumes her “spiritual energy”, is immediate. She wishes for them to be accomplices. “There is something absolute and impregnable in certain people, it’s like a distance from the world, from the living,” Jaeggy observes early in the novel. “But it’s also somehow the sign of someone confronting a power we know nothing of.” Much of the same could be said of the author, who is as enigmatic as her writing. A quarter of a century later, the powerful economy of her prose and the distinct pleasure it affords only leaves a reader returning for more. As Joseph Brodsky said of the novel: “Reading time … four hours. Remembering time … the rest of one’s life.” Jaeggy’s sentences are cool and austere at times, and like most of her writing cut the way a surgeon might, precisely and with the aim of preserving. “She already knew everything, from the generations that came before here” the protagonist admires, “she had something the others didn’t have”. I was first introduced to Jaeggy after a friend left me with a copy of Proleterka, in which the 15-year-old protagonist is stripped of her innocence. As in Sweet Days of Discipline, this novel is preoccupied with death and its inevitability. Many recurring melancholic themes in Jaeggy’s work – boarding schools and equally remote parents – are semi-autobiographical details. Born in Zurich in 1940, Jaeggy grew up speaking French, German and Italian, but writes in the latter. The author, who seldom grants interviews, was described as a “monumental loner” by Gini Alhadeff, who translated her latest story collection I Am the Brother of XX. The writing of her fourth novel, Sweet Days of Discipline, was described by Jaeggy as an “exercise in self-punishment”. It was the first of her novels to be translated from Italian into English by novelist and translator Tim Parks, who first encountered “I beati anni del castigo” in an Italian bookshop. In Italy, it was awarded both the highly prestigious prizes; the Premio Bagutta and the Premio Speciale Rapallo. It later won the John Florio prize in 1992. At the end of the novel, the friends are reunited in Paris by chance, and Frédérique returns to us in destitution. Living “in a room carved of nothing”, a single bulb hangs from the ceiling, there is only a chair for one. She pours alcohol into a saucepan and lights it to warm them. “Je cause avec eux” – “I chat with them” – she explains of her rambling sentences to her childhood friend: she is speaking with the dead. Frédérique becomes mentally ill and attempts to burn down her family home in Geneva, with her mother inside. “Is it sorcery that brings lovers together?” the narrator wonders near the end. I have a feeling Jaeggy knows the answer.