Near the start of Fleur Jaeggy’s extraordinary novel Proleterka, the unnamed narrator reflects: ‘Children lose interest in their parents when they are left. They are not sentimental. They are passionate and cold.’ Passionate and cold is also an apt description of Jaeggy’s writing: the fierceness of her words erupts from the seams of her tiny, frigid sentences, sometimes just a word or two long. It also fits the narrator, even though she evidently hasn’t lost as much interest in her abandoning parents as she’d like. Her ‘sudden desire’ for her father’s ashes opens the book; then we are plunged back into her recollection of a fornight’s holiday with him on a cruise to Greece on SS Proleterka when she was 15.
The narrator’s awkward, distant relationship with her parents is felt in Jaeggy’s shifting, interchangeable terms for the characters. Her father is variously ‘my father’, ‘the father’ and ‘Johannes’; strikingly, her mother is often relegated to ‘Johannes’s ex-wife’; and the narrator moves between ‘I’, ‘she’, and ‘Johannes’s daughter’. Often these shifts come within the same paragraph, as though the labels of these relationships, these constructs of identity, are being tested and found wanting.
This is a telling backdrop to the narrator’s violent sexual awakening with various members of the boat’s crew, which leaves her spinning between desire and repulsion: ‘I want more and more… I don’t like it, I don’t like it, she thinks. Yet she does it all the same.’ After the first time, she attempts to say I love you in the sailor’s language and his rebuke, ‘That’s enough… Get dressed’, in her language, ‘comes to me like a whiplash’. It’s especially painful, as this tentative emotional opening is the narrator’s only one. She is accustomed to closing herself off from others.
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