The water statues

In this strange and shimmering nonlinear text from Swiss writer Jaeggy (I Am the Brother of XX), the lonely children of the wealthy and their eccentric employees negotiate the boundary between companionship and solitude. In Amsterdam, Beeklam grows up with only his father, Reginald, after the death of his mother, Thelma. Reginald never remarries and lives in seclusion with his servant, Lampe, a man curiously similar to him: "the two men had hardly met but were in perfect agreement, two finicky little plants," Jaeggy observes. As an adult, Beeklam stocks the basement of his house with statues and spends more and more time with them, "losing control of the hours and of life." Beeklam, too, has only one companion: his servant, Victor. After Reginald, at 70, suddenly leaves his house and abandons Lampe, Lampe goes to work for Kaspar, another widower who was a friend of Thelma's. Through this new connection to Kaspar and a child who lives with him and may be Kaspar's daughter, Beeklam and Victor's small universe grows a little larger. In short, enjoyably expressionistic sections, Jaeggy sketches the emotional lives of people marooned but not content to remain entirely alone. What emerges is a fascinating and memorable portrait of a milieu obsessed with the passing of time. (Sept.)

A constellation of characters (and their servants) move, shrouded by loss and isolation, through their lives in Amsterdam. Beeklam was born in a house on a hill of boulders. After his mother's death, he lived with his father, Reginald, a man of "innate cruelty" and "innocent, clueless inhumanity." As an adult, he lives in a large stone building near the harbor in Amsterdam, where he moves among his basement full of statues. Gaps in the walls reflect the movement of the waves across the stone. At night, Beeklam walks the city, gazing into windows and feeling content to lack any domestic entrapments beyond his servant, Victor: "so much happiness he was happier living without." In the second half of the book, we are introduced to young Katrin, who "considered everything ephemeral as her property." She is especially haunted by a childhood spent at boarding school. Disgusted and isolated by her surroundings, she's seen by the headmistress as being "gripped by some inscrutable witchcraft." Katrin's "companion" is the widower Kaspar, and their servant is Lampe, who formerly served Beeklam's father. This interconnectedness among characters is sketched elusively: The characters never truly interact in meaningful ways, mostly delivering soliloquies, sometimes to themselves, sometimes in the presence of others, though rarely in true dialogue. Jaeggy highlights this disconnectedness by structuring the book as a hybrid between a play and a novel. The work proceeds through these chimeric vignettes, punctuated by Jaeggy's hallucinatory, nonlinear prose, where phrases recur and echo, and the reader moves as if through a series of dream fragments guided by dream logic, where statues and passing crows can be more real than the human beings we share our lives with. A beautiful but inscrutable book about disconnection and the passage of time. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.