After a shoddy first foray into the post-modernist genre with Slow Man... Coetzee gives it another, more heart-felt, more honest shot and produces a book of breathtaking courage and poignancy. I have just finished reading the book and can honestly say that I am a little shaken, having come face t...
In Foe, Coetzee reinvented (some would say "rewrote" but I disagree) Defoe's Robinson Crusoe. But in Foe, adventurous Crusoe becomes weak-minded Cruso (without an "e"), civilized Friday from a Caribbean descent becomes a negro whose tongue was cut off and unable to speak. Coetzee also introduces ...
Is There Joy in Utter Destitution?Musings on The Life and Times of Michael K.When I was thirteen, we moved out to a smallholding on the outskirts of Johannesburg. We still refer to it as “The Farm”, but only about a third of the land was arable, the rest was slate, covered with a thin crust of du...
I picked this book off the library shelf and read the blurb, and decided to read it because there seemed to be parallels with my own youth. What did I hope for? To make sense of my own youth? To make sense of things that happened to me?The protagonist in the book is a mathematics student at the U...
Publicado en http://lecturaylocura.com/el-maestro-...El maestro de Petersburgo de J. M. Coetzee. La escritura como sacrificioIntenta lanzar un encantamiento, pero ¿sobre quién? ¿Sobre un espíritu o sobre sí mismo? Piensa en Orfeo cuando camina hacia agrás, paso a paso, susurrando el nombre de la ...
J.M. Coetzee's Afterword implies a clear ending to a convoluted story which, by the way, is told in three first person narratives with an epilogue to muddy the waters. I have a tremendous amount of respect for Coetzee and readily concede that he is probably quite good at reading and reviewing wor...
Sometimes I trust incoherent book recommendations more than I trust well-argued ones. An ability to conjure many and persuasive words, often as not, leaves me cold, especially if those persuasive words contain nothing personal, nothing that another reviewer equally endowed with “objectivity” coul...