J.M. Coetzee
Author
Born
John Maxwell Coetzee, February 9,
Agent—Peter
Lampack, 551 Fifth Ave., New York, NY 10017. Home—Australia.
Applications
programmer, International Business Machines (IBM), London, England, 1962–63;
systems programmer, International Computers, Bracknell, Berkshire, England,
1964–65; State University of New York at Buffalo, NY, assistant professor,
1968–71, Butler Professor of English, 1984, 1986; University of Cape Town, Cape
Town, South Africa, lecturer in English, 1972–82, professor of general
literature, 1983–2001; Hinkley Professor of English, Johns Hopkins University,
1986, 1989; visiting professor of English, Harvard University, 1991.
International
Comparative Literature Association, Modern Language Association of America.
CNA
literary award for In the Heart of the Country, 1977; CNA literary award
for Waiting for the Barbarians, 1980; James Tait Black memorial prize
for Waiting for the Barbarians, 1980; Geoffrey Faber Award for Waiting
for the Barbarians, 1980; CNA literary award for The Life and Times of
Michael K, 1984; Booker–McConnell Prize for The Life and Times of
J. M. Coetzee
Michael K, 1984; Prix Femina Etranger for The Life and Times of Michael K, 1984; D. Litt., University of Strathclyde, Glasgow, 1985; Jerusalem Prize for the Freedom of the Individual in Society, 1987; Sunday Express book of the year prize for Age of Iron, 1990; Premio Modello for The Master of Petersburg, 1994; Irish Times international fiction prize for The Master of Petersburg, 1995; Booker prize for Disgrace, 1999; National Book League and Commonwealth Writer's prize for best novel for Disgrace, 1999; Life Fellow, University of Cape Town; Nobel Prize for literature, 2003.
J.
M. Coetzee explores the implications of oppressive societies on the lives of
their inhabitants, often using his native South Africa as a backdrop. As a
South African, however, Coetzee is "too intelligent a novelist to cater
for moralistic voyeurs," Peter Lewis declared in the Times Literary
Supplement. "This does not mean that he avoids the social and
political crises edging his country towards catastrophe. But he chooses not to
handle such themes in the direct, realistic way that writers of older
generations, such as Alan Paton, preferred to employ. Instead, Coetzee has
developed a symbolic and even allegorical mode of fiction—not to escape the
living nightmare of South Africa but to define the psychopathological
underlying the sociological, and in doing so to locate the archetypal in the
particular."
Though
many of his stories are set in South Africa, Coetzee's lessons are relevant to
all countries, as Books Abroad's Ursula A. Barnett wrote of 1974's Dusklands,
which contains the novellas The Vietnam Project and The Narrative of
Jacobus Coetzee. "By publishing the two stories side by side," Barnett
remarked, "Coetzee has deliberately given a wider horizon to his South
African subject. Left on its own, The Narrative of Jacobus Coetzee would
immediately have suggested yet another tale of African black–white
confrontation to the reader." Although each is a complete story,
"their nature and design are such that the book can and should be read as
a single work," Roger Owen commented in the Times Literary Supplement.
Dusklands "is a kind of diptych, carefully hinged and aligned, and of
a texture so glassy and mirror–like that each story throws light on the
other." Together the tales present two very different outcomes in
confrontations between the individual and society.
Coetzee's
second novel, 1977's From the Heart of the Country, also explores racial
conflict and mental deterioration. A spinster daughter, Magda, tells the story
in diary form, recalling the consequences of her father's seduction of his
African workman's wife. Both jealous of and repulsed by the relationship, Magda
murders her father, then begins her own affair with the workman. The integrity
of Magda's story eventually proves questionable. "The reader soon realizes
that these are the untrustworthy ravings of a hysterical, demented individual
consumed by loneliness and her love/hate relationship with her patriarchal
father," Barend J. Toerien reported in World Literature Today.
Coetzee
followed From the Heart of the Country with 1980's Waiting for the
Barbarians, in which he, "with laconic brilliance, articulates one of
the basic problems of our time—how to understand [the] mentality behind
the brutality and injustice," Anthony Burgess wrote in New York. In
the novel, a magistrate attempting to protect the peaceful nomadic people of
his district is imprisoned and tortured by the army that arrives at the
frontier town to destroy the "barbarians" on behalf of the Empire.
The horror of what he has seen and experienced affects the magistrate in
inalterable ways, bringing changes in his personality that he cannot
understand.
Coetzee's
fourth novel, The Life and Times of Michael K, was published in 1983.
According to CNN.com, it
was "the story of a young gardener abandoned after his mother's death in a
South Africa whose administration is collapsing after years of civil
strife." The book won the Booker Prize in 1984.
In
1987's Foe, a retelling of Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe,
Coetzee tells the story of the mute Friday, whose tongue was cut out by
slavers, and Susan Barton, the castaway who struggles to communicate with him.
Daniel Foe, the author who endeavors to tell Barton's story, is also affected
by Friday's speechlessness. Both Barton and Foe recognize their duty to provide
a means by which Friday can relate the story of his escape from the fate of his
fellow slaves who drowned, still shackled, when their ship sank; but both also
question their right to speak for him. "The author, whether Foe or
Coetzee, wonders if he has any right to speak for the one person whose story
most needs to be told," West Coast Review's Maureen Nicholson
noted. "Friday is the tongueless voice of millions."
In
1990's Age of Iron Coetzee addresses the crisis of South Africa in
direct, rather than allegorical, form. The story of Mrs. Curren, a retired
professor dying of cancer and attempting to deal with the realities of
apartheid in Cape Town, Age of Iron is "an unrelenting yet
gorgeously written parable of modern South Africa, a story filled with
foreboding and violence about a land where even the ability of children to love
is too great a luxury," Michael Dorris wrote in Tribune Books.
In
Coetzee's next novel, 1994's The Master of Petersburg, the central
character is the Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky, but the plot is only
loosely based on his real life. In Coetzee's story, the novelist goes to St.
Petersburg upon the death of his stepson, Pavel. He is devastated by grief for
the young man, and begins an inquiry into his death. He discovers that Pavel
was involved with a group of nihilists and was probably murdered either by
their leader or by the police. During the course of his anguished
investigation, Dostoevsky's creative processes are exposed; Coetzee shows him
beginning work on his novel The Possessed.
Coetzee's
nonfiction works include 1988's White Writing: On the Culture of Letters in
South Africa, 1992's Doubling the Point: Essays and Interviews, and
1996's Giving Offense: Essays on Censorship. In White Writing,
the author "collects his critical reflections on the mixed fortunes of
'white writing' in South Africa, 'a body of writing [not] different in nature
from black writing,' but 'generated by the concerns of people no longer
European, yet not African,'" Shaun Irlam observed in MLN. The seven
essays included in the book discuss writings from the late seventeenth century
to the present, through which Coetzee examines the foundations of modern South
African writers' attitudes. In Doubling the Point: Essays and Interviews,
a collection of critical essays on Samuel Beckett, Franz Kafka, D. H. Lawrence,
Nadine Gordimer, and others, Coetzee presents a "literary
autobiography," according to Ann Irvine in a Library Journal
review. Discussions of issues including censorship and popular culture;
interviews with the author preceding each section round out the collection.
Giving Offense: Essays on Censorship was Coetzee's first collection of essays in
nearly ten years, since White Writing appeared. The essays collected in Giving
Offense were written over a period of about six years. Coetzee discusses
three tyrannical regimes: Nazism, Communism, and apartheid; and, drawing upon
his training as an academic scholar as well as his experiences as a fiction
writer, argues that the censor and the writer have often been
"brother–enemies, mirror images one of the other" in their struggle
to claim the truth of their position.
In
1997's Boyhood: Scenes from Provincial Life, Coetzee experiments with
autobiography, a surprising turn for a writer, as Caryl Phillips noted in the New
Republic, "whose literary output has successfully resisted an
autobiographical reading." Boyhood, written in the third person,
"reads more like a novella than a true autobiography. Coetzee develops his
character, a young boy on the verge of adolescence, through a richly detailed
interior monolog," wrote Denise S. Sticha in Library Journal. He
recounts his life growing up in Worcester, South Africa, where he moved with
his family from Cape Town after his father's latest business failure. There, he
observes the contradictions of apartheid and the subtle distinctions of class
and ethnicity with a precociously writerly eye. Coetzee, an Afrikaaner whose
parents chose to speak English, finds himself between worlds, neither properly
Afrikaaner nor English. Throughout his boyhood, he encounters the stupid
brutalities inflicted by arbitrary divisions between white and black,
Afrikaaner and English.
The Lives of Animals, published in 1999, is a unique effort by Coetzee, incorporating his own
lectures on animal rights with the fictional story of Elizabeth Costello, a
novelist obsessed by the horrors of human cruelty to animals. In this
"wonderfully inventive and inconclusive book," as Stephen H. Webb
described it in Christian Century, Coetzee poses questions about the
morality of vegetarianism and the guilt of those who use animal products. But
his arguments are not simplistic: he wonders, for example, if vegetarians are
really trying to save animals, or only trying to put themselves in a morally
superior position to other humans. Following the novella, there are responses
to Costello's arguments from four scholars who have written about animals:
Barbara Smuts, Peter Singer, Marjorie Garber, and Wendy Doniger. The sum of the
book, wrote Marlene Chamberlain in Booklist, is valuable "for
Coetzee fans and others interested in the links between philosophy, reason, and
the rights of nonhumans."
Coetzee's
next novel, 1999's Disgrace, is a strong statement on the political
climate in post–apartheid South Africa. The main character, David Lurie, is an
English professor at the University of Cape Town. He sees himself as an aging,
but still handsome, Lothario. He has seduced many young women in his day, but
an affair with one of his students finally proves his undoing. Charged with
sexual harassment, he leaves his post in disgrace, seeking refuge at the small
farm owned by his daughter, Lucy. While David's world is refined and highly
intellectualized, Lucy works at hard physical labor in simple surroundings.
David's notions of orderliness are overturned when three men come to the farm,
set him afire, and rape Lucy. Father and daughter survive the ordeal, only to
learn that Lucy has become pregnant. Eventually, in order to protect herself
and her simple way of life, she consents to become the third wife in her
neighbor's polygamous family, even though he may have arranged the attack on
her in order to gain control of her property. The novel won the Booker Prize in
1999; Coetzee made history by becoming the the first author to win the award
twice.
Antioch Review
contributor John Kennedy noted, "In its honest and relentless probing of
character and motive … this novel secures Coetzee's place among today's major
novelists.… The impulses and crimes of passion, the inadequacies of justice,
and the rare possibilities for redemption are played out on many levels in this
brilliantly crafted book." The author's deft handling of the ambiguities
of his story was also praised by Rebecca Saunders, who in Review of
Contemporary Fiction warned that Disgrace is "not for the
ethically faint of heart." Saunders felt Coetzee has "strewn nettles
in the bed of the comfortable social conscience," and his book is written
in the style "we have come to expect" from him, "at once
taciturn and blurting out the unspeakable."
On
December 10, 2003, Coetzee was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. He
dedicated the award to his mother. In 2004, Coetzee edited and translated Landscape
with Rowers: Poetry from the Netherlands. The novelist introduced and
translated one poem each by five 20th centruy Dutch poets and three by a sixth.
In April of that year, Coetzee was nominated for the Christine Stead Prize for
fiction, one of the New South Wales Literary Awards, which are one of
Australia's top literary events. The event marked the first time that a Nobel
laureate had been nominated for one of the awards. He also was on the shortlist
for Australia's Miles Franklin Literary Award for his 2003 novel Elizabeth
Costello. That same month, five of Coetzee's novels were released in China
for the first time. The books included Waiting for the Barbarians, Youth,
and Disgrace.
In
addition to his writing, Coetzee has produced translations of works in Dutch,
German, French, and Afrikaans, served as editor for others' work, and taught at
the University of Cape Town. "He's a rare phenomenon, a
writer–scholar," Ian Glenn, a colleague of Coetzee's, told the Washington
Post's Allister Sparks. "Even if he hadn't had a career as a novelist
he would have had a very considerable one as an academic." Coetzee told
Sparks that he finds writing burdensome. "I don't like writing so I have
to push myself," he said. "It's bad if I write but it's worse if I
don't." Coetzee hesitates to discuss his works in progress, and views his
opinion of his published works as no more important than that of anyone else.
"The writer is simply another reader when it is a matter of discussing the
books he has already written," he told Sparks. "They don't belong to
him anymore and he has nothing privileged to say about them—while the book he
is engaged in writing is far too private and important a matter to be talked
about."
http://www.notablebiographies.com/newsmakers2/2004-A-Di/Coetzee-J-M.html
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Academic year 2008/2009
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