J.M Coetzee
J.M. Coetzee was born in South Africa in 1940 and educated in South Africa and the United States. He has published sixteen works of fiction, as well as criticism and translations. Among awards he has won are the Booker Prize (twice) and, in 2003, the Nobel Prize for Literature. He lives in Adelaide, South Australia. He has a strong interest in translation, having worked as a translator himself, and in the importance of dialogue and exchange between writers and critics from across the world, having long undertaken this process of ongoing dialogue. To this end he recently engaged with scholars and writers from Argentina in developing an initiative called The Literatures of the South, which links writers and critics from a number of regions, including South America, Southern Africa, and Australia.
All essays by J.M Coetzee
All essays featuring J.M Coetzee
She and Her Man: Foe
There are many ways to read Foe (1986), which has a shifting choose-your-own-strange-and-surprising-adventure flavour to it; I’ve tried a few. My favourite is to reverse-engineer Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe from the perspective of the castaway Susan Barton’s account of her very different experience of Cruso in Coetzee’s novel. Putting the chronological cart before the horse (a method that owes something to Jorge Luis Borges’s deadpan comic masterpiece Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote), we realise that Robinson Crusoe would have been a much duller book (not that it is free of unabridged longueurs) if Defoe had not first read Coetzee’s Foe and fictionalised and glamourised Barton’s account of her largely adventure-free time marooned on the island, in order to create a more ripping yarn.
Novelist of the Sorrowful Countenance: The Schooldays of Jesus
There are critics who have suggested that J. M. Coetzee’s writing lost its edge when he emigrated from South Africa to Australia. I don’t necessarily agree, though it is undeniable that the move coincided with a shift in the tone and emphasis of his work. There is a harrowing quality to the novels up to and including Disgrace (1999) that all but disappears from those that followed. The tendency to anguish over intractable moral questions is still very much in evidence in the later novels, but their cultural burden feels less crushing, as if some of the weight of inherited postcolonial guilt has been lifted. It is not as if Coetzee’s adopted home lacks for its own history of violent dispossession and racist subjugation, but the embrace of a new life in a new country seems to have afforded him the opportunity, if not exactly to reinvent himself, then at least to reorient himself as a novelist, let his guard down a little, write in a more relaxed and ironic register, conceive works that are less tightly buttoned in a formal sense, and re-examine some of his defining themes in ways that incline away from the historical and toward the philosophical. Some of the unusual atmosphere of Coetzee’s two most recent novels, The Childhood of Jesus (2013) and its sequel The Schooldays of Jesus, can be attributed to the fact that they push this tendency to an extreme.
Signs for the Soul
The reading Coetzee offers of Gerald Murnane is interesting in a number of ways: it not only tells us things that Coetzee sees in Murnane, it tells us that Coetzee considers Murnane’s work to be important, and worthy of wider attention. It also tells us that Coetzee sees things in Murnane that concern him, in every sense of the word concern.
Avuncular question marks: The Childhood of Jesus by J.M. Coetzee
Now, we have a new novel with the bizarre title (for Coetzee anyway) of The Childhood of Jesus. It comes with a cover of a young child in sunglasses and dress-up cloak and is like nothing on earth, and not much else in the history of literature.
I refuse to Rock and Roll: J.M. Coetzee: A life in writing
J.C. Kannemeyer describes ‘What is a Classic?’ as ‘one of the most important lectures of [Coetzee’s] career’. It is certainly one in which a number of key themes intersect. As Kannemeyer observes, it is especially striking for the way Coetzee relates Eliot’s ideas to his own experience…