These Possible Lives by Fleur JaeggyTranslated by Minna Zallman ProctorNew Directions, 2017

This short book (it’s only sixty pages) consists of three biographical essays about writers: there’s one about Thomas De Quincey, one about John Keats, and one about Marcel Schwob. I was somewhat familiar with Keats before reading this, a bit less familiar with De Quincey (or TDQ, as he’s referred to in the book), and not at all familiar with Schwob, and I’m curious as to how these pieces would read to someone more familiar with these figures than I was. These essays trace their subjects’ lives from childhood to literary career to death, and in each piece, there’s a sense of the writer as devoted to literature. Jaeggy describes Schwob, for example, as someone whose “head was stuffed with names, words, and legends” (52). Or there’s this, about Keats when he decided to be a writer instead of practicing medicine: “He devoured books, he copied, translated sections, he became the scribe and secretary to his mind” (31). Jaeggy isn’t only writing about these men, though, but about the times and places in which they lived: I love the start of the Keats essay, which you can read in full on the New York Review of Books website. My favorite piece, though, was the one about De Quincey, maybe for its wintry mood, which made a pleasant contrast to summer in New York. I like atmospheric lines like this: “From the first week in November until the end of January he pleaded with the sky: he wanted more snow, more ice, more storms and frost” (10). Or this: “Cloaked in a driver’s mantle, some legal papers, and frost, Thomas surprised his shoes and went skating down the street” (15). Though this book is not a novel, it made me think of Danielle Dutton’s Margaret the First: I feel like people who enjoyed that book would like this one, and vice versa, because they both explore historical writerly figures in stylistically interesting ways.