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J.M. Coetzee

The Bloomsbury Handbook to J.M. Coetzee edited by Andrew van der Vlies and Lucie Valerie Graham

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March 2024, no. 462

In 2015, the Nobel Prize-winning author J.M. Coetzee released a volume of reflections on ‘truth, fiction and psychotherapy’ under the title The Good Story. The volume, co-written with Arabella Kurtz, a psychotherapist, preserves the distinctiveness of the viewpoints of the two interlocutors throughout. As we read these exchanges between the writer and the psychotherapist, we are in the realm not of ‘autrebiography’, where the self is endlessly reflected as if in a hall of mirrors, but of autobiography, where the self is transparent to itself and its own viewpoint. What we hear on Coetzee’s side is the plain voice of the author – an author not undone by an army of caveats about truth in the vein of the postmodern, an author who has not departed and been replaced by her readers. This is a voice that engages with Plato’s injunction against the poets in The Republic, a voice that finds value in the artifice of the ‘good story’ even as it acknowledges the failure to tell the story of the good, a voice that ruminates on whether truth as an ethical enterprise might even have disappeared from the psychotherapist’s consulting rooms. In the only mention of this work in the capacious Bloomsbury Handbook to J.M. Coetzee – it occurs in Nick Mulgrew’s chapter ‘Later Criticism and Correspondence’ – this statement is recorded:

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On this week’s ABR podcast, critic and essayist James Ley reflects on J.M. Coetzee’s Life and Times of Michael K, forty years after its publication. Coetzee’s fourth and Booker Prize-winning novel was his landmark work, explains Ley. This was despite it receiving criticism for supposedly eliding the political realities of Apartheid South Africa by being set in ‘the realm of allegory’. Listen to James Ley with ‘An obscure prodigy: J.M. Coetzee’s Life and Times of Michael K at forty’, published in the August issue of ABR.

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‘Why should I be expected to rise above my times? Is it my doing that my times have been so shameful? Why should it be left to me, old and sick and full of pain, to lift myself out of this pit of disgrace?

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This week, on the ABR podcast, literary critic and editor Geordie Williamson reviews J.M. Coetzee’s new short story collection The Pole and Other Stories. At the age of eighty-three Coetzee has again proved himself a ‘true and loving creator’, argues Williamson, by denying his characters endings or wholeness – ‘the great lie of art’. Listen to Geordie Williamson with ‘Last things: J.M. Coetzee’s antipodal forces’, published in the July issue of ABR.

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The aphorist Georg Christoph Lichtenberg likened reviews to ‘a kind of childhood illness to which newborn books are subject to a greater or lesser degree’, like measles or mumps, which kill a few but leave the rest only mildly marked. But how should we consider reviews of books that come late in an author’s career? In instances such as these, the reviewer is tempted to avoid any chance of career-ending pneumonia, applying a nurse’s gentling touch to the text. Often the result is career summation, a soft peddle at indications of decline.

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Anyone who has read J.M. Coetzee’s Diary of a Bad Year (2007) will vividly recall the character Alan – annoyingly brash, unethical, self-serving and sexist; one of a new generation of tech-savvy investment consultants. For British academic, literary critic, and writer Andrew Gibson, in this new study of Coetzee, these are among the typical traits of neoliberal individualism that Coetzee’s body of writing resists and critiques. Gibson characterises contemporary global neoliberalism as having led not just to the impoverishment of modern culture but to a lack of planetary care, resulting in climate change, precarity, and depleted resources. The book’s dustjacket brings these issues closer to home; it features an apocalyptic image of the thick orange smoke from the 2019 bushfires at the New South Wales coastal town of – appropriately – Eden. (Gibson was in Australia at this time as a Visiting Professor at the J.M. Coetzee Centre for Creative Practice in Adelaide.)

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J.M. Coetzee by Anthony Uhlmann & A Book of Friends edited by Dorothy Driver

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August 2020, no. 423

Though it is his second country of citizenship, Australia might be classified as J.M. Coetzee’s fourth country of residence. He was born in South Africa and served as an academic at the University of Cape Town from 1972 to 2000; he lived in England between 1962 and 1965, where he studied for an MA thesis on Ford Madox Ford and worked as a computer programmer; and he then spent seven years in the United States, taking his doctorate at the University of Texas and being subsequently appointed a professor at the State University of New York. Since his move from Cape Town to Adelaide in 2002, Coetzee’s global literary reputation has risen significantly, helped in large part by the award of the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2003.

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John CoetzeeJ.M. Coetzee was born in South Africa and educated in South Africa and the United States. ...

It is commonly accepted that the modern European novel begins with Don Quixote. Lionel Trilling went so far as to claim that the entire history of the modern novel could be interpreted as variations on themes set out in Cervantes’s great originating work. And the quality that is usually taken to mark Don Quixote as ... ... (read more)

Beyond the Ancient Quarrel: Literature, philosophy and J.M. Coetzee is a new collection of essays on J.M. Coetzee, perhaps the most important author of imaginative literature in the world today. Unifying the diverse strands of argument animating this thoughtful volume, the book’s editors, noted Coetzee scholars ...

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