#j. m. coetzee

[davidhudson]

Happy 85th, J. M. Coetzee.

[litsnaps]

[somc]

Las imágenes son una fantasmagoría de sus movimientos reales

[theflyestwhiteboyofthemall]

i just fi ished binge reading the father of saint Petersburg by coetzee n tht was truly an exp i didnt set out to read it all in one night but it was def a page turner

[grandhotelabyss]

Is Coetzee European? I thought he was South African/Australian

I was making a (serious) joke about his aesthetic allegiances since I have him shelved in my mind with Kafka, Beckett, Bernhard, Sebald etc.—I think he has himself acknowledged these allegiances, as if to say there were no other choice, really, for a white South African who aspired to serious literature—but yes, he's originally from South Africa and is now an Australian.

[quotessentially]

From J. M. Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians

[kultur-geek]

Un personnage pour défendre la littérature

[neuroconflictos]

J. M. Coetzee, "La Edad de Hierro".

[mechaprimaverapicnic]

Infancia. J. M. Coetzee.

Mondadori. Buenos Aires, 2003. p. 105-106.

[papaltiara]

I tried to take someone over and had to break

[grandhotelabyss]

About Coetzee, iirc you described him as the “highest expression of liberal guilt” once. What did you mean by this?

I meant that he didn't believe in revolution, thus "liberal," so he consistently staged epiphanically abasing or "decreating" (I have to stop pretending I've read Simone Weil) encounters of the privileged with the oppressed for various meanings of oppressed, thus "guilt," in early- and mid-period books like Waiting for the Barbarians, Life & Times of Michael K, Foe, Age of Iron, Disgrace. But these are at least officially secular epiphanies; perhaps starting with The Master of Petersburg (there are still Coetzee books I haven't read), a more openly Christian idiom emerges, suggesting the possibility of metaphysical transcendence, which comes to fruition in the Jesus trilogy and takes leave of liberal guilt as it takes leave of the idea that we are consigned solely to the mundane. The concern with the oppressed as such also retreats, though it had already been arguably replaced with a concern for the non-human anyway. I think my absurdly long 11-year-old essay on The Childhood of Jesus tries to get at this idea through a contrast with Foe, but I can't bear to reread it.

[philosophybitmaps]

[anokatony]

'The Pole' by J. M. Coetzee - Beatriz and Witold

  ‘The Pole’ by J. M. Coetzee    (2023) – 167 pages   Witold is a 70 year-old man from Poland who is a concert pianist but refers to himself as simply “a man who plays the piano”. His name, Witold Walczykiewicz, “has so many w’s and z’s in it, no one on the board even tries to pronounce it. They refer to him simply as ‘the Pole’.” He travels around Europe giving concerts playing the music pieces…

[litsnaps]

[whatdoeschronicevenmean]

“Writing under censorship, the writer may produce a text identical in all respects to the text he would have produced in a state of ideal freedom; in this sense he has indeed been unaffected by the censorship. But to say that such a writer has transcended or overcome or escaped the censorship depends on an ahistorical and simplistic notion of what writing, and indeed the institution of literature, is.… Publication in a regime of censorship is a different kind of act from publication in conditions of freedom; whether the work appears with or without the censor’s imprimatur, reading it—and, in such a society, reading in general—is a more complex, more suspicious activity.”

J. M. Coetzee, “Zbigniew Herbert and the Figure of the Censor”

[grandhotelabyss]

Thoughts on Coetzee's DISGRACE? I finished it two weeks ago, and while the experience of reading it felt a bit slight at first, I can't stop thinking about it. I haven't had this kind of lingering effect since reading Bellow's SEIZE THE DAY a couple of years ago—or perhaps from the man who influenced both works: Dostoyevsky. Rarely does a book burrow into me like that!

It's great. I read it in one sitting, only once, 20 years ago, and still remember much of it; it's one of the more unforgettable novels I've ever read. On the other hand, I've been wary of revisiting it for fear its impact might depend on the initial harrowing and unpredictable experience of it. The initial response was polarized even if the Nobel shortly followed—James Wood and Salman Rushdie, who have nothing in common aesthetically—both gave the novel bad reviews. Its political reception has long been fraught, with strong accusations of racism, though Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak notably defended it, and it was a key text for discussions of everything from nationhood to "nonhuman life" in academe in the 2000s. I probably find its askesis intolerable and should learn to give up hope.