Jaeggy's boarding-school novel - minimlaism at the extreme

Swiss writer Fleur Jaeggy's novel - doesn't it seem as if it might be an essay or a memoir? - of her year as a 14-year-old in a Swiss boarding school, Sweet Days of Discipline (1989), gets better and stranger toward the end as FJ moves ahead in time and we get glimpses of her boarding school friends and acquaintances in later life; I won't give anything away, but it's fair to say that none has fared well as a result of the boarding-school experience. Interestingly, despite the ominous title, there is no violence or abuse or any other form of mistreatment in this novel; there is a bit of cruelty but not the bullying that is often a feature of prep lit. The sorrow and isolation these young women feel in their boarding school isn't because of the school but in spite of it: It's the parents who are to blame - strange and distant, getting on w/ their jet-set lives while putting the kids pretty much into cold storage. This novel is so slight as to verge on minimalism - 101 small pages, to be precise. I appreciate a work that accomplishes its goals as efficiently as possible - most novels suffer from maximalism, writers enamored of their own voices, but in this case I think the novel could have used more "fleshing out." FJ's character sketches are not just minimal, they're really outlines, particularly of the narrator's 2 best friends in school - neither of whom comes to a happy ending. Couldn't she have given a hint of the troubled psyches and difficult family dynamics that ultimately damaged these seemingly A-list students? I don't need every blank to be filled, every T to be crossed - but I do need a few poignant scenes, some further details or observations or insights, that foreshadow the dark outcomes that lie ahead. 



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