So, last day of February, time for a reading post. For my second author-focus of the year I chose the Nobel-Prize-winning South African / Australian writer J. M. Coetzee, who I'd never read before. I've read glowing reviews of his books for many years, but they always sounded so serious and depressing that I didn't venture to try one.
He's still alive, still writing. He was born in 1940, so he's around the age of my oldest cousins.
It's always interesting to read an author's first book, but his wasn't available in any libraries around here, so I ordered it from Amazon. I happened to find his third book at the Bookworm, and I got his fourth book from the library.
I found these three books very interesting and confusing -- but in a good way, mostly. Below are my confused but interested (as opposed to interesting) thoughts on them.
- Dusklands (1974). When I first looked at my copy of this book, I thought it was two short stories, or novellas. They didn't seem to have anything to do with each other, either: one is set in the US during the Vietnam war and one is set in South Africa in the 1700s. But (as I perused articles online) I learned that people do view Dusklands as a novel, with the two stories being somehow part 1 and part 2. Welcome to J. M. Coetzee, I thought. Apparently it took him quite a while to start writing -- he was 34 when this book was published, and he'd been noodling around with its ideas for a long time, while studying linguistics. (Ha ha, doesn't everyone?)
Quick plot summary: part 1 is the ruminations of a man called Eugene Dawn who has been hired to write a plan for psychological warfare in Vietnam; part 2 is an account of a hunting expedition in South Africa in the 1700s. Both parts are disturbing, and part 2 is heartbreaking and nauseating. White people in South Africa did terrible things to the native peoples and the animals there (not unlike American settlers and their attacks on the native peoples and animals here). As I read, I kept wondering whether it was necessary to give all the gory details in order to make the point Coetzee wants to make. Maybe yes, maybe no.
Coetzee plays a lot of games in this novel (or, as an article in the New York Times would have it, "metafictional evasions"). The bizarre structure is one kind of game. Then there are the names. In part 1, the narrator's supervisor is someone named Coetzee, who he hates. In part 2, the explorer is named Jacobus Coetzee, and his account of his expedition was supposedly published by someone named Dr. S. J. Coetzee and translated by a J. M. Coetzee, supposedly S. J. Coetzee's son. So you get to spend time thinking about why Coetzee (the author) would keep throwing his name into the story and what that means. (One article I read implied that the supervisor named Coetzee in part 1 is the S. J. Coetzee of part 2.) Also, in part 2, we actually get three different accounts of the expedition, two of which contradict the main one. At first I thought I'd read it wrong, that I was misunderstanding the book. Finally I found an article that mentions the contradictions.
I kept looking around the internet for explanations of this novel and I found an article that explains how some or all of the Coetzees, as well as other people in part 2, were real people -- or somewhat altered versions of real people (though not necessarily related to J. M. Coetzee). According to this article, as near as I could understand it, part 2 of Dusklands is very much related to real South African history, presenting [the author] Coetzee's perspective on it. So can you read & understand Coetzee's fiction without knowing South African history?
For such a short book (my edition is 125 pages), there is a lot in here. Although I wouldn't recommend it -- too painful, just too horrible -- it made me curious to read more by J. M. Coetzee. I like his mind, though I fear my mind may not be up to following his ideas. So on we go, for now. - Waiting for the Barbarians (1980). This started out violent and disgusting, like Dusklands, and I thought, oh, no, I can't take much more of this. Especially in February. I thought it was going to be another book about how men have this intrinsic need to be horrible to other people and animals, and why exactly do I need to read about that again?
But then it changed. The main character, the Magistrate of a distant outpost, is a fairly good guy, a guy with a moral compass, and the bad guys are the police, who journey from the capital to the Magistrate's town because they think the "barbarians" are threatening the Empire. While the Magistrate's goodness isn't a match for the bad guys' badness, it makes the book more tolerable. And then a few good things start to happen. I thought it was a more hopeful book. It has fewer little games going on (that I could see) compared to Dusklands, though I assume the title is a nod to Waiting for Godot (who also never comes).
It was not clear where Waiting for the Barbarians was set, but definitely not South Africa. The winters were cold, with snow, so that would suggest somewhere else, possibly North or South America. It was obviously not meant to be a real place, or a real "Empire."
There is a movie of Waiting for the Barbarians, so I ordered it from Prospector. It wasn't supposed to be very good. I would say it was mixed. I liked Mark Rylance's Magistrate. Johnny Depp as the evil Colonel Joll was kind of silly, but Robert Pattinson was good as the evil Officer Mandel. Just like with the book, I didn't like the movie in the beginning, but it somewhat grew on me. The movie was filmed in Morocco, and the "barbarians" were played by Mongolian people, an interesting choice. The ending wasn't right -- I felt as though the writer/director misunderstood the book. Or I did. Or something. - Life & Times of Michael K (1983). This was the longest of the three short books (184 pages), but I read it very quickly. Michael K's story is terrible, but he's an appealing character, so I kept wanting to know what happens next. This novel is set in South Africa during apartheid, but also during a civil war that never actually happened. Michael K is born with a harelip, and his mother cleans houses while he "learns to be quiet" and is later sent to some kind of institution for poor? difficult? disabled? non-white? children. Race is seldom mentioned in the book and you have to just guess what race the different characters are, which is an interesting decision of Coetzee's, considering how enormously important race was in South Africa at the time. Michael K and his mother are presumably not white (I read somewhere that Michael K is supposed to be of mixed race), but I wondered about some of the other characters. Perhaps it would be obvious to a South African reader. I won't give the whole plot, but Michael and his mother end up leaving the big city (Cape Town) and going into the interior, where she dies and he becomes more and more derelict, homeless, close to death. He never quite dies, although his thoughts in the last few pages might be occurring right before his death. Or not?
If someone wanted an "easy" Coetzee, this could be a place to start. I read a review of a puppet version of the book (put on in New York City last year) that sounded wonderful. According to the review, Michael is "a refugee trapped in his own country... a puppet manipulated by forces beyond his control." Of course the review is referring to the puppet in the play, but yes, I see that the novel is also about Michael as puppet. So I guess the message of the book is that we (or at least non-white South Africans during apartheid, but probably all the rest of us all the time too) are puppets manipulated by forces beyond our control, but at the same time we still have our hopes and dreams, our essential selves. For what that's worth.
These three books were all so short -- and so interesting -- that I was tempted to go on and read more Coetzee, but I decided to stick to my plan to read no more than three this month. I do want to go on reading him, but not all at once. I'm very pleased that I overcame my suspicions about him and gave him a try. I can see myself becoming a real Coetzee fan. Maybe in a month or two I'll let myself read another.
Since it was the second month of the year I also read another book from the piles by my bed. The book I read was The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store by James McBride, which wasn't in those piles last year, since I just got it for Christmas, but it still counts. I read another book by McBride a few years ago, The Good Lord Bird, which I didn't like very much, so I was a little worried about this one, but it was a different experience and I did enjoy it. Now I want to read McBride's memoir of his mother, The Color of Water.
I also finally finished the long biography of Woodrow Wilson, thank goodness. And I read a couple of books of poetry. At the end of 2023, reviewing my list, I decided that I wanted to read more poetry. So I'm trying to read a book of poems each month. Poetry collections aren't long, so this isn't an onerous task, but they do require careful reading (if you want to get anything at all out of the experience).
Now comes March. One of my ideas for this year's reading was to explore authors I already like, based on having read one or two of their books. So I've decided that in March I will read three books by Lily King. I read her novel Euphoria back in 2015 with my book group and LOVED it. I'd always meant to read her other books (she's written four other novels and a collection of short stories) but never did. So in March I plan to take another look at Lily King. I'll let you know how it goes.
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