In 2003, when J. M. Coetzee was announced the recipient of that year’s Nobel Prize in Literature, the news wasn’t met with outraged cries of “Who?” or “Why?” With nine brilliant novels under his belt, along with a haul of prestigious literary awards—including a hitherto unprecedented two Booker Prizes—the South African-born author had been a laureate-in-waiting.
In its citation, the Swedish Academy made mention of the “great wealth of variety” in Coetzee’s works. Though spare, austere, and clinically precise, his novels are rich in moral complexity and ambiguity, and each ruthlessly probes the human condition. But each does so in a different way. Over the course of his career Coetzee has channeled literary antecedents (Defoe in Foe and Dostoyevsky in The Master of Petersburg); has tracked the plight of individuals bowed by societal pressure and prejudice or broken by political upheaval (Waiting for the Barbarians, Life & Times of Michael K, Disgrace); and in more recent books has employed allegory to explore exile and displacement (The Childhood of Jesus, The Schooldays of Jesus).
Along the way, Coetzee has pushed the boundaries of the novelistic form. Elizabeth Costello unfolds as a series of “lessons” (“The Novel in Africa,” “The Lives of Animals”) while Diary of a Bad Year comprises essays and philosophical meditations (“On the afterlife,” “On the origins of the state”). There have been three fictionalized memoirs (the last installment, Summertime, being about the late writer John Coetzee, a fictionalized version of himself) and the metafictional trappings of his novel Slow Man (in which a novelist who had appeared as a character in a previous Coetzee novel shows up and interacts, perhaps authorially, with the other characters). On each occasion Coetzee has not so much tweaked the rules of writing fiction as ripped up the rulebook to pursue his own agenda. The results can be challenging, even maddening, but are always stimulating, underscored with fierce intelligence and ambition.
The Nobel committee also highlighted the “analytical brilliance” that is at work in Coetzee’s novels. However, it is on better display in Coetzee’s nonfiction, specifically his literary criticism. Two collections—Stranger Shores and Inner Workings—gathered together book reviews and essays on authors from 1986 to 2005, showcasing the breadth of his reading, the depth of his thought, and the range of his critical faculties. Now comes a third volume, Late Essays, which collects 23 literary appraisals published since 2006. Some pieces are short, some are long. A few focus on living greats but most cover famous deads. Some subjects are poets, some are novelists; many are European, others are from further afield.
Late Essays opens with Defoe—not with his first novel, Robinson Crusoe, but his last and much less well known, Roxana. Coetzee calls Defoe “an unwitting, accidental pioneer of the novel of realism” and then goes on to examine the book’s preoccupations with both sexual seduction and money (the latter of which can be seen like a watermark throughout Defoe’s oeuvre). As ever—and unlike some critics—Coetzee is undaunted by classic texts: He refuses to overlook flaws or paper over cracks with either mealy mouthed platitudes or disingenuous faint praise. He flags faults—Roxana suffers from being too long and repetitive—but also judiciously balances the rough with the smooth by declaring that in the last stretch the pace is cranked up, the drama is restored, and Defoe was “writing beyond his powers.”
Ford Madox Ford is evaluated in a similar fashion. Coetzee, having written his university thesis on this English “craftsman,” is well equipped to judge, and he tackles Ford with authority. He writes off much of Ford’s output, noting how in one novel after another “the construction is careless, the plot uninteresting, the characterization shallow, and the prose merely passable”—before he turns his attention to the book that redeemed Ford, that “virtuoso exercise in novelistic technique,” The Good Soldier.
Coetzee studies Ford’s treatment of infidelity and suicide, then he brings in Madame Bovary to record “echoes.” Later, in an actual piece on Flaubert’s novel, Coetzee makes another welcome detour to trace parallels, this time finding it “instructive to compare Emma with the other great adulteress of nineteenth-century fiction, Anna Karenina.” And in one standout essay, “Eight Ways of Looking at Samuel Beckett,” Coetzee co-opts Melville to argue that the question that lies at the heart of Moby-Dick is analogous to the question at the center of Beckett’s work—namely whether our lives are shaped and guided by a good or bad force or whether what we go through is “just stuff happening.”
Some essays with commonalities are clumped together. That Beckett essay is one in a batch of four. There are also four essays on writers from Coetzee’s adopted homeland: one apiece on Les Murray and Gerald Murnane and two on Patrick White—hailed in the United States as an “antipodean William Faulkner” and regarded by Coetzee himself as “the greatest writer Australia has produced.” There is a further quartet of essays on German-speaking authors, including Goethe and the enigmatic Swiss writer Robert Walser.
* *
Most of the essays illustrate Coetzee’s expertise. However, some illuminate certain flaws. Ten of the essays in the collection were written as introductions to classic novels translated into Spanish and published by a Spanish-language press. These are brief prefaces within tight confines, which afford Coetzee little room for maneuver; all too often he gives only bare-bones synopses, back-to-basics breakdowns, and opinions posited rather than reinforced.
Again and again in these essay-introductions we witness Coetzee both selling himself short and spreading himself thin. Samuel Beckett, we are told, “was an Irishman who during his early career wrote in his native English but for his later and more important work switched to French.” The Scarlet Letter, we learn, “is not an allegory—that is to say, it is not a story whose elements map closely onto the elements of another story taking place in some other, parallel realm.” A novella, we discover, is “a work of medium length with a single action and a single main character, focused on a single topic.”
The flip-side of this oversimplification is Coetzee’s tendency to supply random German words in parenthesis. It is not enough for him to say that Kleist describes the eponymous hero of his story “Michael Kohlhaas” as “terrible,” he also has to include the original “entsetzlich.” In the same piece, we hear how Kleist drew up a “life-plan” (“Lebensplan”) to cover his own “education” (“Bildung”). And so it goes on, here and elsewhere. Instead of clarifying, Coetzee ends up complicating, overburdening his reader with extraneous information. Almost as frustrating is that some important German terms are either left untranslated (the late-18th-century artistic movement of Sturm und Drang) or rendered incorrectly (Walser’s novel Geschwister Tanner comes with no definite article; if it had it would be die, not der).
These weaknesses, which presumably arise from the varying needs and limitations of the different audiences for which the essays were written, fortunately are overshadowed by the collection’s strengths. The nine essays that appeared in the New York Review of Books are meatier pieces; the higher word-counts mean more workspace, allowing Coetzee to read widely as well as closely and to develop significant arguments and tackle attendant issues. The longer of the two essays on Patrick White discusses the ethics of countermanding an author’s instructions and posthumously publishing an incomplete or “unachieved” work. A substantial review of Philip Roth’s Nemesis incorporates the Oedipus fable, a primer on polio, and fascinating etymological findings: “Nemesis (the noun) exactly translates the Latin word indignatio, from which we get the English word indignation; and Indignation happens to be the title of a book Roth published in 2008.” One particularly satisfying essay on Irène Némirovsky leaves us wanting more of the same—more pieces that comprehensively trawl a writer’s life, devoting equal attention to career-defining books and secondary works, and more pieces on women writers (Némirovsky is the sole female author here).
In his book of correspondence to his friend Paul Auster, Here and Now, there is one letter in which Coetzee warns of the lopsided power and unfair advantage that a critic can wield over an author: “He becomes like the child lobbing pebbles at the gorilla in the zoo, knowing he is protected by the bars.” Coetzee, who has stood on both sides of the bars, is no such critic. He doesn’t lob pebbles, throw brickbats, or deliver low blows. His critiques are constructive and instructive. Above all they do what all good literary essays should do: They encourage us to read and reread, to appreciate anew and newly discover.
Malcolm Forbes is a writer and critic in Edinburgh.
