Reviews with content warning for Suicide - Sweet Days of Discipline

The entirety of these hundred pages felt like a fever dream. The story winds through the narrator's adolescence, purposefully disjointed, as if her recollection of early life is coming to mind out of order. To me, the strongest theme (and emotion, really) that this story portrays is "memory." How and what we remember, why certain moments of young adulthood feel critical and dire, what concepts form as we are experiencing attraction and desire for the first time. I wish I could've read this in it's original Italian. The prose is so incredibly lush. It gives a heady feeling, full of poetic language that I think I will recall for a long time.

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hestia100's review against another edition

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dark emotional mysterious reflective sad tense slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? No
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

3.5

Content Warnings

kell_xavi's review against another edition

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reflective sad slow-paced

3.0

There’s a distance, an observant quietude touched with melancholy, a passive empathy and a passive malice both, to this book. Sometimes, the narrator seems to forget her own self, observing a daughter or a friend or a student before the psyche once again coalesces with the identity. There’s a lightness to many observations, even the stirring, heavy ones. There’s so often an acidic undercurrent to the lives of rich boarding school girls, a normality to their objectification and a seepage of closeness into obsession. I enjoyed Jaeggy’s story a lot.

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