(i am a white middle class over-educated australian, who speaks 5 languages but not dutch)

i saw coetzee here in sydney not long after he emigrated to australia (lives in adelaide hills i believe – full of german wine-growers, not unlike stellenbosch and paarl i imagine, in bygone years).

he did not read anything from his novels, but rather an essay he’d written on a children’s story (i forget which – maybe wind in the willows or alice in wonderland). he was just as weird as you guys described. not broken, but restrained.

i am now going to read his earlier books – our little local library has absolutely everything of his.

it helps now to be married to a south african – to understand bits of afrikaans slang and refs to cape town suburbs. but mostly to understand the whole mess that is “legacy of apartheid”.

the bride price/dowry thing – that is universal in black africa (not just in south africa), well-known i thought.

But even the most privileged white south africans (who moved to Sydney 15 years ago) are morally and socially at my grandparents’ level. That is, they have been stuck in a time warp since 1930s. I mean they are pre everything, certainly pre-feminism. The flipside is, of course, that they are not confused – men known what men are supposed to do, women the same, and chidlren are allowed a childhood, unlike here in the west where 5 year old girls now dress like paris hilton. Women do not feel like they are missing anything, they “know their place”.

If I were a lesbian however I would not live there except for the mardi gras thing in Cape Town – it rivals ours here, I hear.

anyway, that’s my 2 cents’ worth!

jb says: Hi Alanna. Good to hear from you and good, also, that you enjoyed the book. It is something special. Why do I think your post is going to be a little controversial?

The scenes in his daughter’s farm, the animal hospice, the black and white conflict are not central. They just operate as a catalyst.

Hicham.

SO his decline into his own despair, through volunteer work with dogs to be put down, his deigning to sleep with a woman he finds unattractive (though years younger than him…), I find the typical indulgence of an individual who has in his youth had great arrogance, a belief in his own superiority, vanity, intolerance regarding women. Only in his 50′s when no one looks at him anymore, when no woman turns her head and returns his smiles, when his students don’t listen and look through him, when his wives have left him and even his “ho” rejects him, then he begins a journey of anguish, as the white people of South Africa are now doing.

On the other hand, this story is so well written, such a metaphor for many other parts of life and parts of the world undergoing cultural decline, that anyone could enjoy reading it.

I didn’t think that 52 is considered old, but perhaps for men in South Africa, if 30 is old in a woman, then 52 is ancient in a man. I have never been there, but in some ways it sounds stuck in a timewarp, mentally, especially as regards women. His poor daughter doesn’t even try to fight back, or leave the farm, just accepts that she will have biracial children as a third wife of a former dogman! She has to give up the land as a DOWRY! She is allowed to “keep the house”! And the fact that she is lesbian, did not desire to sleep with any man, is ironic: does it represent the old South Africa, which wanted nothing really to do with the nonwhites, esp. blacks, getting forcibly raped by them, one even wrong in the head, so that the country is forced to submit to a new race’s rule!? Violence and rape will win Africa for the blacks, yippiee!

Mary

Can somebody tell me a little about John’s latest “Inner Workings”. the book is pretty costly here in India, and i was wondering how it is…

PS – In the last post it should have been “there are no right answers” instead of “there are no write answers”.

Apologies for the same.

Despite the fact that John is a recluse and its difficult to extract much from him about his own life and its influence on his works; I guess if any one is interested in knowing about him, his books are the best resources. From Boyhood to Youth to Disgrace to Elizabeth Costello and now Inner Workings. I guess all of these draw heavily upon Coetzee’s own life. I have read only Youth, Disgrace and Elizabeth Costello; and I find that a lot of information about the man’s life and mind is available from there.

In a way I identify with Coetzee to a great sense; my perception is that he is a very confused man; understandably so as he is a perfectionist and instead of accepting a theory or a philosophy which can not prove itself to him; he prefers to remain confused. He doesn’t attempt to preach and provide answers in his works, as probably he understands that there are no write answers. His life seems to have been a continuous struggle with himself more than with anyone else. The world by and large does not seem to bother him after he reached a certain age. I guess, even if he does not dislike human beings; he does not have agreat amount of love for them either. This despite the fact that he is so sensitive to and aware of the human suffering. To my mind he expects a certain level of dignity for every human being irrespective of their backgrounds and political / ideological allegiences.

I guess he is recluse because he understands the futility of it all; futility of fame; because of the changes it may bring into him. There is something that this man knows and has realized which we all are not aware of as yet.

If I get to speak with him some day; what a conversation it would be!!

DP

jb says: Hi Dharini. I also read Foe a couple of years ago, but didn’t get on with it as well as some of the others. I tried the video link again just now and works fine for me. Have you got javascript enabled on your computer?

Then I went out for some errands and… picked up Disgrace (for 10 euro) on the way home. Can’t say when I’ll get to it, because I have still so much more in queue, but at least we’re one step further: it’s here, in the house waiting to be got to.

I almost feel Coetzee-esque (if that’s a word) in my faltering attempts to tackle the man (I won’t even start about Gravity’s Rainbow)

Thanks for the post. One man’s re-reading can become another’s discovery it seems.

jb says: Listen to them bells, Nils. The whole world, it seems, wants you to put that book on the top of your pile.