Published in 1989, a haunting novella Sweet Days of Discipline by the Swiss writer Fleur Jaeggy tells a story of a nameless distant protagonist, an adolescent female reminiscing nostalgically about her teenage years in an oppressive boarding school located in post-WW2 Switzerland.

In her book, Jaeggy explores the meaning of freedom, submission, blind obedience, control and domination as well as adolescent longing and friendship in an emotionally detached environment.

Sweet Days of Discipline looks into the consequences of existing in the place that demands constant obedience and total submission to the imposed rules in order to maintain discipline. Our female adolescent protagonist uses sadistic control over others to unsuccessfully fill up the emotional void and to make her engagement with the world more bearable. Her life seems to be deprived of innocent traits often assigned to people of her age.

Our nameless protagonist develops an obsession with one of other students, Frederique. When they both meet as adults decades later, that ‘sweet’ discipline to which they were subjected to in the boarding school, became the source of severe mental health struggles and existential collapse for Frederique. Their adolescent experiences conditioned their entire adulthood. There was no escape from that control for those who wanted to live according to their own ethical compass even after leaving the boarding school.

Written in a melancholic introspective and detached style, Sweet Days of Discipline captures the atmosphere of the existential punishment and angst where various characters appear and disappear into nothingness or emptiness depicting the loss of the innocence through subtle domination of others.

With its precise and cold prose, Sweet Days of Discipline is a deeply moving book. Ultimately it is an intense meditation on human condition and alienation in all its shades of emotions where neither children nor adolescents are spared the existential pain.