Sweet Days of Discipline by Fleur Jaeggy (1989)

A resident in a girl's boarding school learns about life, despite or because of her sheltered world.

Book Review: Sweet Days of Discipline is the story of a fourteen-year-old girl, written by a woman looking back at age fifty ("years and years have passed and I can still see her face"). Written in a quiet, almost icy manner, everything is seen at a remove. No flaming passions; always control and discipline. Each student in the boarding school builds a facade for the world to see, until a new student arrives, Frederique, who seems beyond that, the perfect student ("she was entire unto herself"). Our narrator "wanted to conquer her ... I had to conquer her." The two become friends, though "even now, I can't bring myself to say I was in love." The friendship is at an almost mystic level, but always restrained: "We never held hands ... there was a kind of fanaticism that prevented any physical expression ... the thought of flesh or sensuality eluded us." At first our narrator is captivated: Frederique "played [piano] with a certain passion"; she "spoke of a man as of a completed parabola." She was "the most disciplined, respectful, ordered, perfect girl, it almost made your flesh creep." The object of her attention is always distant, immaculate, as if from another plane. Although Frederique is the center of Sweet Days of Discipline, she is not the whole and our heroine explores other aspects of life, always coming back to the contradictory complexity of "the pleasure of disappointment ... perhaps they were the best years ... those years of discipline ... there was a kind of elation throughout all those days of discipline." There are also other stories: the stolid German roommate, the beautiful young girl who isn't as beautiful as she thinks she is, the new interest whose "red hair was magnificent," the tragic African girl who withers alone in a strange land far from home. I had to read Sweet Days of Discipline twice to fully appreciate it. The ending came as a surprise, came from nowhere, and I went back to read it again to see that the resolution came from somewhere. On my first reading the novel seemed too little, too much withheld, too superficial, too much allusive and hinting, not enough substance, only suggestion. But on second reading I grasped the whole, restrained, controlled, and distant as it is. In her subtle, muted way Fleur Jaeggy captures something unusual, "The pleasure that comes from obedience. Order and submission, you can never know what fruits they will bear in adulthood."  [4★]