I want to read a hundred biographies like this. ( )

no one's life story needs more than 1o pages. ( )

This superbly concentrated book of creative nonfiction should not be knocked back like a shot, but rather sipped slowly like a good grappa. It consists of three hyper-brief biographies of writers: De Quincey, Keats, and Marcel Schwob. The lives herein are, as the original title has it, ‘congetturali’, and yet the moments of poetic speculation are few and serve only to highlight the accuracy of a certain mood and tone associated with each subject.

It took Andrew Motion more than six hundred pages to tell the story of Keats's life. Jaeggy boils it down to fewer than twenty-five. ‘Walking on the heath, Keats came across a being with a strange light in its eyes, a rumpled archangel—he recognized Coleridge. They walked together and spoke of nightingales and dreams.’ Later, in the depths of his illness: ‘They soothed him with currant jellies and compotes, some of which dripped onto a Ben Jonson first edition.’

Her skill is in the chaining-together of telling detail with no extraneous links between them, a life in a small series of close-up photographs. But the images seem to be infused with mystic significance, so perhaps not so much photographs as tarot cards. Evoking the literary circle around De Quincey, she gives us the following paragraph, full of exact specificities but veiled in mystery because of how they are catalogued:

Henry Fuseli ate a diet of raw meat in order to obtain splendid dreams; Lamb spoke of “Lilliputian rabbits” when eating frog fricassee; and his sister Mary, wielding a knife, chased a little girl who was helping her in the kitchen and then stabbed her own mother through the heart; Hazlitt was perceptive about musculature and boxers; Wordsworth used a buttery knife to cut the pages of a first-edition Burke. Coleridge, his head shrouded in a fog, read poetry badly and moaned gloomily. The dreams of Jean Paul, the crow that loved the storm, reverberated across the Lake District. This was TDQ's Western Passage.

One senses how iconic anyone's life can become when reduced to a litany of camera-flash incidents. When Marcel Schwob travels through the South Seas, she concertinas the voyage down to the following:

In Colombo he drowsily contemplated the babel of religion. There were cartloads of people praying in a cavern, a Tamil feast. He was always tired and it was hard to breathe; the hot wind blew at him and dust and flies stuck to his skin. The Australian landscape seemed sinister, long cadaverous beaches where the brush moved in the wind like the gnarled hair of dead people. In Samoa they called him Tulapla, the talk man, and kept him up late into the night telling stories. He shook the hand of King Mataafa, who looked like Bismarck.

The translation into American English, from Minna Zallman Proctor, is generally excellent, although there are a couple of minor solecisms that apparently come from unfamiliarity with the British context: she writes of something costing ‘three or four guinea’ and of climbing ‘the Ben Nevis’. But that aside, this heady alembication of lives is a stimulating, provocative experience, and Jaeggy's brevity does succeed in finding a kind of truth that doorstop biographies can only ever circle around. ( )