This is, of course, a “depressed young women in gothic horror houses” triptych. Sweet Days of Discipline by Fleur Jaeggy, translated by Tim Parks, is set in a mountain boarding school of the 1950s, with a narrator obsessed with the new girl, Frédérique.
Frédérique took my hands and said: “You’ve got an old woman’s hands.” Hers were cold. She looked at the backs of my hands: you could count the veins and the bones. She turned them over: they were shrivelled up. I can hardly describe how proud I was to hear what for me was a compliment. That day, on the stairs, I knew she was attracted to me. They really were an old woman’s hands, they were bony. Frédérique’s hands were broad, thick, square, like a boy’s. Both of us wore signet rings on our little fingers. You might imagine that we found physical pleasure in touching each other like this. As she touched my hand and I felt hers, cold, our contact was so anatomical that the thought of flesh or sensuality eluded us. That winter I bought myself a loose pullover and hid my body. My old woman’s hands were all the more obvious.
Sweet Days of Discipline
The book is wintry, severe in both its asceticisms and affections, and full of madness and death. Frédérique is the one who has mastered discipline as a form of unassailable contempt, for her teachers, her peers, and the world at large. Later she will commune with the dead and attempt matricide: a creature of perfect order, ticking less like a clock and more like the other thing that ticks.
Catherine House by Elisabeth Thomas is set in a tiny, highly prestigious, very weird experimental university—“a postsecondary school more selective than any Ivy League”—that isolates its students from the outside world, severely restricting outside contact and banning access to mass media. It’s set in the 90s (though it’s not quite our 90s, it turns out, but a world being radically altered by the discovery of a substance called plasm, research into which is the source of Catherine House’s prestige and wealth) which also helps with the isolation, given the lack of cellphones and internet. Ines, the narrator, is using that isolation to hide from trauma and possible criminality in the outside world, but she is so profoundly depressed she can barely study enough to keep herself in school, even though her life may depend on it: she drifts in a haze of parties and sex until something happens to her roommate Baby, who Ines casually designated her new best friend on their first day. Unlike with Frédérique, whose narrator became obsessed with her on sight, Ines only becomes obsessed after the irrevocable has already happened. This book has my favourite ending of the three: after everything, it is a real wrench to hear footsteps where they shouldn’t be.
Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s Mexican Gothic is, like Sweet Days of Discipline, set in the 1950s, and, like Catherine House, its setting is both severely isolated and literally maddening. Noemí is there to rescue her cousin Catalina from her monstrous marriage and loathsome in-laws. The house is haunted, of course, dank and fungal, and Catalina sickened by it, her paranoias both fantastical and accurate. The contagion is the most invasive in this book: where with Frédérique it’s within her, and where in Catherine House it is hidden, mediated by plasm and invocation and secret laboratories, Noemí and Catalina are submerged in it, breathing it in, dressing for dinner with abomination.
Vajra Chandrasekera 