Sweet Days of Discipline by Fleur Jaeggy📖

Summary of Sweet Days of Discipline 

“Sweet Days of Discipline” explores the tense relationships between teenage girls – and the narrator’s naive infatuation with another girl – at a boarding school in 1950s Switzerland. When Frédérique, a new student, arrives at the school, Eva, the narrator, is attracted by her charm and intelligence, and is determined to become her best friend.

Reasons to read Sweet Days of Discipline 

“Sweet Days of Discipline” is a melancholic and unsettling novella, written in cool, detached prose. Set in the rigid world of a Swiss boarding school, it portrays a story of innocence, control, and latent cruelty among young girls longing to escape and explore the wider world. The novella won the Italian Premio Bagutta in 1990. Fleur Jaeggy is a Swiss-Italian author of novels, plays, and song lyrics, who writes in Italian. In 2002, she won the Viareggio Prize for her novel “Proletarka”.

Setting: Appenzell (Switzerland)

Novel set in Switzerland: Appenzell region (while the school’s exact location is not named in the novella, it is likely inspired by the Voralpines Töchter-Institut Buser in Teufen, where Fleur Jaeggy was a student).

Original title: I beati anni del castigo

Year of publication: 1989

Nr of pages: 112