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“... J.C. Kannemeyer reports, Peter Randall, the director of Ravan Press in Johannesburg, asked J.M. Coetzee to consider supplying ‘a few more personal details’ for the jacket of his first novel. ‘We are often criticised,’ Randall wrote, ‘for not telling readers about our authors. While I do not want to overdo this, some more information about your ...”

“... was itself censored.’ Censorship is ashamed of itself. It is also ridiculous: a censor, J.M. Coetzee writes, is like a man trying to stop his penis from standing up. To censor is to give proof that one is in the grip of that which one wishes to forbid others desiring. Not even feminist critics of pornography like the philosopher Catharine MacKinnon ...”

“... minority rule. The anthology of fiction, A Land Apart, was, say its editors, André Brink and J.M. Coetzee, ‘compiled amid the tumult of the uprisings of 1985’, although the writers they choose to represent had not then had the time to reflect upon that tumult in their work, and almost certainly have not had sufficient time since. Outside South Africa, A ...”

“... Whenever​ we are in the company of J.M. Coetzee, whether it be an interview, a novel, a memoir or an essay, we are inexorably drawn into the realm of the ethical. We must judge and be judged, or at least strive to do the one and brace ourselves for the other. Hence a book titled The Good Story will not offer an analysis of the qualities that make for a satisfying reading experience, but investigate the consequences of storytelling in terms, frankly, of good and evil ...”

“... English-speakers are destined to remain bit players in the unfolding political drama. J.M. Coetzee, a member of a bilingual group (Afrikaans and English-speaking) that squeezed its way into white South African life in the twilight hours of Smuts and the gathering gloom of D.F. Malan and his successors, understands the marginality of the ...”

“... and Times of Michael K (1983) in the New York Review of Books, Nadine Gordimer wrote about J.M. Coetzee’s ‘conscious choice’ of allegory as a literary mode in his first three novels. The reasons for this, she speculated, were temperamental: It seemed he did so out of a kind of opposing desire to hold himself clear of events and their ...”

“... of many writers as they grow older, grow cooler or colder,’ JC, the authorial surrogate in J.M. Coetzee’s Diary of a Bad Year (2007), writes. The texture of their prose becomes thinner, their treatment of character and action more schematic. The syndrome is usually ascribed to a waning of creative power; it is no doubt connected with the attenuation of ...”

“... A new novel by J.M. Coetzee is always an event, although often a disconcerting one. ‘Disconcerting’ will be too polite a word for many readers, who can’t bear the chill that emanates from these works, especially Disgrace (1999), Elizabeth Costello (2003) and Slow Man (2005). The same chill can be picked up in Coetzee’s critical essays, where it is likely to appear as offhand authority ...”

“... engage’; ‘not wholly satisfactory as either novel or memoir’). Is the tide turning against Coetzee? Or is this darkly teasing little book really so much worse than its predecessors? It’s not as if we expected to be charmed. The drab early 1960s London setting is as grim as Coetzee’s South Africa ever was; the ...”

“... life is dead,’ Pasternak wrote in Doctor Zhivago – ‘history has killed it.’ In J.M. Coetzee’s new novel, Disgrace, which is set in a violent post-apartheid South Africa, David Lurie, a Cape Town academic, reaches a similar conclusion when his daughter Lucy is gang-raped by three black men at her isolated homestead in the Eastern Cape. ‘But ...”

“... is different: it records a series of interviews, by a prospective biographer, of people who knew Coetzee, along with some notes by the biographer himself about possible additions and developments. By the time of the interviews the novelist, who emigrated to Australia, has not only won the Nobel Prize for literature but died. The chronological sequence of the ...”

“... and strangely, almost inhumanly, distanced from his characters. Since J.M. Coetzee often writes about cruel whites and suffering blacks in South Africa, he doubtless occasions feelings of compassion and political indignation in his admirers. But he does not go out of his way to stimulate such a positive response – not in The Life and ...”

“... social mission that a 19th-century realist such as George Eliot professed. But both she and J.M. Coetzee confront the situation of present-day South Africa in which, under the National Party and its possible successors, the right to privacy is everywhere denied. Everything is political, and all politics is the politics of conflict: in My Son’s Story and ...”

“... of ants biting ‘my tender anus, on to my weeping rose, my nobly laden testicles’. J.M. Coetzee is a South African, educated in the United States. The biting of ear and ants occurs in the second of his two monologues – the narrative of an implausible 18th-century explorer called Coetzee in Hottentot territory, a ...”

“... willingness to give a junior colleague a leg-up is surpassed only by that of Salman Rushdie, J.M. Coetzee and Thomas Pynchon. There’s clearly a connection between reclusiveness and readiness to puff, even if Rushdie’s withdrawal from the public eye was neither voluntary nor permanent. Maybe it’s simply a question of having plenty of time on one’s ...”