Who is jm coetzee

The control of the elements is too tight. Nowhere do you get a feeling of a writer deforming his medium in order to say what has never been said before, which is to me the mark of great writing. Too cool, too neat, I would say. Too easy.

Too lacking in passion. Even when a writer has achieved international fame and won the biggest trophies - the Nobel and two Booker prizes, in Coetzee's case - a bad review can't be easy to stomach. Harder if it is not just your book that is criticised, but the premise on which you have built your life: namely, that you can, must and should write. Worse still, if the reviewer impugns your character along with your novels. It sounds hurtful, and perhaps it is, although the novelist who wrote it was JM Coetzee.

The bad meta-review of Coetzee comes out of the mouth of one of the characters in Coetzee's new book, Summertime , which is about Coetzee. Summertime is full of harsh reviews of Coetzee by Coetzee, of Coetzee the writer and Coetzee the man. The critics are four women, all once loved by "John Coetzee", the Coetzee character, three of them loving him back, in different ways.

Another says: " You have also to be a great man. And he was not a great man. He was a little man, an unimportant little man How can you be a great writer if you are just an ordinary little man? Coetzee built his literary reputation on the eight novels he published between and None was less than unusually good, but three in particular have carried his work into the realm of lasting things. The first was Waiting for the Barbarians, a parable about the use of falsely imagined enemies for social control.

Substitute "terrorists" for "barbarians" and you have a history of Britain and America since Coetzee's book came out in Coetzee won the Booker with his fourth novel, Life and Times of Michael K, an eerily colour-blind account of its eponymous hero's odyssey from the city to the wilderness and back in a South Africa enduring an imaginary war.

A third masterwork, Disgrace, won him the second Booker. Coetzee took off his skin to write the almost unbearably truthful story of a white lecturer who takes sexual advantage of a student, is disgraced and goes to his daughter in the country, where she is gang-raped.

The fact that the rapists are black, and that the up-and-coming black farm worker who lives close to his daughter isn't cooperative in catching them, provoked anger in the upper echelons of South Africa's post-apartheid government. Coetzee emigrated to Australia in , although it is not clear whether this was because of the new South African order.

Since Disgrace, the nature of Coetzee's project has changed. He has moved away from naturalistic, storytelling fiction towards other forms - essays, polemic and memoir, or a composite of all three in a fictional framework.

It is ironic that a writer with an undeserved reputation for being a recluse Coetzee doesn't like giving interviews seems to be taking less interest in the storytelling keel of his books and is inviting us instead to listen in to an intimate conversation he is having with himself, in the form of multiple alter egos. One is a character type who crops up in Coetzee's novels, a type that has served western male writers of the last half century well, from Saul Bellow to Michel Houellebecq: the learned, sceptical man in middle years, unsure whether the lust for life and love that continues to course through him is a curse or a benison.

Another is Coetzee's female alter ego, Elizabeth Costello, an elderly, scholarly, world-weary novelist whose stern moral principles are provoked more by fear of death than by belief. Coetzee's third literary alter ego is Coetzee himself. Summertime is the third of his fictionalised memoirs. Boyhood, published in , tells of his rural childhood in the parched grandeur of the Karoo, in the west of South Africa, and Youth, which came out seven years ago, is an account of a hesitant coming of age into writership in Cape Town and London in the yet-to-swing 60s.

He oscillates between contempt for himself and wild ambition. He is frantic for intimacy with others, but ambivalent about it when it comes - is it love? Lives of Animals was later integrated into the novel Elizabeth Costello Yet Coetzee's accomplishments do not stop there.

Coetzee is that "'rare phenomenon, a writer-scholar,' Ian Glenn, a colleague of Coetzee's, told the Washington Post 's Allister Sparks. Coetzee's periodical publications of literary criticism and reviews are numerous, and his major book collections include White Writing: On the Culture of Letters in South Africa ; Doubling the Point , essays and interviews with David Attwell; Giving Offense , a study of literary censorship; and Stranger Shores: Literary Essays, As Coetzee's literary stature and international fame have increased, so has his reputation as a reclusive private man.

Coetzee declined to appear in London to receive both his first and second Booker Prizes, and is reluctant to give interviews. As Jennifer Szalai, Harper's Magazine senior editor, summarized in "The urge to confess, to explain oneself to others, seems to hold little temptation for the South African novelist J.

Coetzee, whose lean prose is matched by a resolute unwillingness to talk about it. Recipient of the Nobel Prize for literature, author of more than fifteen volumes of fiction and criticism, the sixty-four-year-old Coetzee rarely grants interviews, and when he does, questions about the meaning of his work are politely rebuffed" Szalai Even so, this private man has begun publishing his remarkable memoirs: to date the first two installments, Boyhood: Scenes from Provincial Life and Youth: Scenes from Provincial Life II , have appeared.

Coetzee: "who in innumerable guises portrays the surprising involvement of the outsider. In this work, Coetzee summarises his themes: race and gender, ownership and violence, and the moral and political complicity of everyone in that borderland where the languages of liberation and reconciliation carry no meaning.

You are a Truth and Reconciliation Commission on your own, starting with the basic words for our deepest concerns. Unsettling and surprising us, you have dug deeply into the ground of the human condition with its cruelty and loneliness. You have given a voice to those outside the hierarchies of the mighty.

With intellectual honesty and density of feeling, in a prose of icy precision, you have unveiled the masks of our civilization and uncovered the topography of evil. Nobel e-Museum. Life and Times of Michael K.

In his first Booker Prize-winning novel, J. Coetzee sets his main character on an arduous physical journey, which becomes a quest for inner freedom. Elizabeth Costello. Despite her fame, a celebrated author continues the struggle to articulate her vision, in J. Slow Man. Sometimes heart-breaking, often funny, Summertime completes J.

See all related overviews in Oxford Reference ». South African novelist and critic whose sophisticated narratives examine the states of mind produced by apartheid and neocolonialism while reflecting on the practice and function of writing. In he returned to his birthplace to teach literature at the University of Cape Town, where he is now a professor. Dusklands , his first major published work, consists of two novellas, the first set against US involvement in Vietnam and the second relating the adventures of an eighteenth-century Boer frontiersman in the South African interior.

In the Heart of the Country , Coetzee's first full-length novel, won South Africa's prestigious CNA award for its portrayal of an Afrikaner spinster who becomes psychotic and self-obsessed on a remote backveld farm. Waiting for the Barbarians , which also won a CNA award, tells the story of a magistrate who becomes disillusioned with the empire he serves until, no longer able to bear his complicity with the regime's injustices, he rebels.

An advocate of contemporary linguistic and literary theory, Coetzee often uses complex analogies and allusions. In Foe Coetzee reworks Defoe's Robinson Crusoe; in Age of Iron a parody of Dante's Inferno underlies the story of the relationship between a white woman with terminal cancer and the black tramp who becomes her companion; and in The Master of Petersburg Coetzee describes Dostoevsky's participation in the events that become the subject matter of that novelist's The Devils.

Coetzee's subtle depictions of isolated self-involved individuals, often set in remote or unspecified places and at obscure times, have left him open to the charge of evading the realities of apartheid South Africa.

A volume of autobiography, Boyhood, was published in