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Shop at Amazon though these links and this site gets a kickback.
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Stephen Mitchelmore offers my first reasons to want to read Summertime and Diary of a Bad Year:
The Complete Review offers another curious judgement: “Coetzee is an incredibly talented writer and a master craftsman — and, yes, this is a meticulously crafted book, and one of [Summertime's] weaknesses is that it is so obviously a construct.” The key words here being “so obviously”. Perhaps the schism then is between those who are troubled by fiction as a construct and those who are . . . continue reading, and add your comments
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Another one just popped up ($$$) in Harper's. This one takes the form of a mock interview with a woman whom a man referred to as "Coetzee" once propositioned, the woman declining because "Coetzee" seemed "soft."
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Oddly enough, they've made a movie of what is probably JM Coetzee's most popular novel, Disgrace. And odder yet, it stars John Malkovich as the philandering professor Lurie. The trailer:
Looks almost decent, doesn't it? Although, I have my doubts . . . bad book = good movie, and vice versa.
For more on how Coetzee fits into the fiction of post-apartheid South Africa, see Matt Cheney's essay at The Quarterly Conversation.
Related Posts
Waiting for the Barbarians
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Moving into prolific author territory, J.M. Coetzee will be publishing his 20th book in late summer, the aptly titled Summertime. Hat tip to the Literary Saloon for the head’s-up.
The book doesn’t yet have a U.S. Amazon webpage, although it is listed on the Wikipedia J.M. Coetzee page, where it has been grouped with Coetzee’s previous memoirs, Boyhood and Youth. So, looks like this will be the third installment of Coetzee’s reflections on a provincial upbringing.
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Matthew Cheney:
And then I realized that I was marking up my teaching copy of Michael K. as if I were marking up a poem. I looked, then, at my teaching copy of Disgrace, from when I used it in a class a few years ago. The same thing. Lots of circled words, lots of "cf."s referring me to words and phrases in other parts of the book. Lots of sounds building on sounds, rhythms on rhythms in a way that isn’t particularly meaningful in itself, . . . continue reading, and add your comments
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With the publication of James Wood’s new book in England, we can already see the beginnings of the coverage that will soon attend its publication over here. In other words, more attention for the one literary critic in America who actually gets attention.
To me this seems unfair. Yes, Wood rightly deserves some attention, but he certainly doesn’t deserve this de facto coronation as the only thing going. Moreover, focusing on one critic to the exclusion of others is contrary to . . . continue reading, and add your comments
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I enjoy few novelists as critics as much as when JM Coetzee steps in to contribute on essay. He’s already written eloquently on Cees Nooteboom in the past, and here he is again, discussing the recently translated Lost Paradise.
Do angels exist? Does God exist? It is not only in the universe of postmodern fiction that such questions have a quaint, old-fashioned—that is to say, pre-postmodern and perhaps even pre-modern—air. In tolerant, post-Enlightenment societies we are free to make up answers to them as we choose, . . . continue reading, and add your comments
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Given that Coetzee’s personal life intrudes on his writing to a greater degree that most novelists at work today, I found this article interesting reading.
A host of questions lurk behind that simple sentence. Why would a novelist who has written so powerfully about the land of his birth pack up and leave? Were his 2002 move and his taking of Australian citizenship last year a betrayal of his homeland, or a rejoinder to a country whose new government had denounced one of . . . continue reading, and add your comments
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That and more in the new Bookforum.
In fiction, Coetzee’s efforts to come to terms with apartheid resulted, early in his career, in the haunting allegory of Waiting for the Barbarians (1980), an exploration of the ways in which empires rise, consolidate, oppress, and fall. Written in a language that is both richly descriptive and strangely disembodied, reaching us, as it were, from the fragmentary archive of a lost civilization, the novel shows us how its well-meaning but weak protagonist is . . . continue reading, and add your comments
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Steve Mitchelmore shares some thoughts on Coetzee's newest:
The writer asks along the way: "Why can there no discourse about politics that is not itself political?". We might wonder in turn: why can there be no novel that is not also just a novel – a work of a masterful imagination? The questions are essentially the same. To say the least, Diary of a Bad Year is as close to answering as any published this year. The writer praises Harold Pinter's trenchant Nobel . . . continue reading, and add your comments
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Recommended Books DeLillo's major work before White Noise is probably his most underrated novel. Its all right here--the politics of paranoia, terrorism, the unnamable--set in an evocative, timeless Greece.
The most bizarre Abe novel I've yet read, which is indeed saying something. About a subclass of Japanese men who go around wearing boxes from the waist up (and then use them as domiciles in the evening), the book is also an experiment in perspective shifts, a highly unstable, metafictional first-person narrative, and an exploration of voyeurism, consumerism, and aberrant sexuality.
Charting the path to three gunshots--the one that killed filmmaker Theo Van Gogh, the one that disabled his Islamic extremist assassin, Mohammed Bouyeri, and the one that led to Vincent Van Gogh’s one hundred years earlier--Olsen tells three separate stories that resonate with one another on numerous levels: the logic of extremism, the role of the dissident in Dutch society, the limits of tolerance, the purpose of the artist, the feeling of the most important five minutes of your life. Read my interview with the author.
Creatively structured, well-executed epic novel of rural South Africa from 1950 - 2000. Takes on a lot and lives up to it magnificently. Highly recommended.
A book that's an interview about the book you're supposedly holding in your hands. Creative, potent, and full of life. Just what metafiction should be. Read my post on it. |
A Note on Links
More Essays by Milan
Speaking of Distraction
The Shallows by Nicholas Carr
Another Review of The Novel: An Alternative History
The Orange Eats Creeps
The Unconsoled and the Annihilation of Plot
The Names by Don DeLillo (1982)
The Box Man by Kobo Abe (1973, English 1974)
Head in Flames by Lance Olsen (2009)
Agaat by Marlene van Niekerk (2006, English 2010)
The Weather Fifteen Years Ago by Wolf Haas (2006, English 2009)
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