Culture. Eat it
9 September 2015
Today, for the first time, I found myself wondering about the time when my passion for reading has blossomed. I wouldn’t say “born” because in each of us it is ready to explode at the right input. We are narrative beings. Life itself is a story. Our story.
I was thinking to a list of books delivered from my Italian teacher as the only task for summer’s holidays at the end of my ninth grade. For most of my classmates that meant -> Italian, no efforts. Myself first I agreed to that thought. Sin or fortunately, my inner guiltiness showed up, so I gave a look at the list. My gaze stopped at the title Sweet days of discipline by Fleur Jaeggy. Don’t ask what pushes a girl of fifteen years old to choose that title among many others, but now as then I would choose it fascinated by the word ‘discipline’.
An exclusive Swiss boarding school, young teenagers, love, loneliness and lack of experience are the ingredients of this story, finely told by the author. It is a foreign world compared to the one we are used to live in, which is exterior, shared and displayed. In this tale, however, silence reigns. Of unheard voices. Of unexpressed emotions. Of Madness. The hidden narrator, who is deliberately not given a name, creeps into the head from first pages. The words seem to betray emotions but actually they weigh as boulders on reader’s heart. Those years of punishment nevertheless still re-emerge as the happiest for the storyteller although their memory has been cleared: the Institut Bausler became in fact a clinic for blinds. Darkness falls on the college and on everything that it meant for the students, who will preserve the memory in the life they have chosen to undertake or that others have chosen for them.
After all, who tells the story confesses: “I sought solitude and perhaps the absolute, but envied the world”.
Estimated reading time for the book: about 4 hours
Photography: Sara Cartelli.
© The Eat Culture.
Author
Bio:
She is an art historian, optimistic and empathic by nature. She imagines a world where sow kindness enjoying the little things. She's in love with stories since she was a child, for the Eat Culture she eats books and arts. Per aspera ad astra says the only tattoo on her skin. It reminds her that the road that leads to her dreams is not always easy but that she never gives up.