Well, in Summertime Coetzee takes his memoir project even further than he did in Boyhood and Youth, the two preceeding memoirs wherein Coetzee writes his past in the third person.  Here, Coetzee is again the subject of the narrative, and we begin with that familiar third-person perspective with some of Coetzee’s notebooks from 1972 – 1975.  However, here there are interjections of some other voice within the narrative, imploring someone to go a little deeper, explore this question more, before moving on to another narrative strand.  It turns out that Coetzee has died.  His biographer, a Mr. Vincent, is going through his old notebooks; these particular ones that introduce the novel appear to be first drafts of passages for Coetzee’s third memoir, which he never finished.  The interjecting voice is Coetzee himself trying to dig deeper into certain topics in the narrative.

Vincent has taken it upon himself to write what would have been in that third memoir, covering Coetzee’s early thirties, around the time he published his first novel, Dusklands.  When Youthended, Coetzee was still in England; from there he eventually went to teach at a university in the United States.  For most of the period Summertimecovers, though, Coetzee is back in South Africa, uneasily tending his ailing father.  His mother is dead. 

To get at this period in Coetzee’s life, Mr. Vincent chooses five people to interview: Julia, Margot, Adriana, Martin, and Sophie.  These interviews, or their resultant text, are the contents of Summertime, and with the first one we realize that Coetzee is playing with biography.

The section with Julia is formed as an interview.  Julia was a neighbor to Coetzee and his father.  She was married and rather lonely, and eventually she and Coetzee became lovers, though that term doesn’t exactly fit.  Vincent asks a question and Julia answers, and Vincent hopes the results can be used to provide color to his biography.  But what we get is a story where Coetzee is merely a side character, and a kind of miserable burden at that.  Whatever indications Vincent gleaned from Coetzee’s notebooks about how important these people were to him, their impressions of Coetzee are quite different:

Mr Vincent, I am perfectly aware it is John you want to hear about, not me.  But the only story involving John that I can tell, or the only one I am prepared to tell, is the one, namely the story of my life and his part in it, which is quite different, quite another matter, from the story of his life and my part in it.

Julia is particularly concerned about how her role in Coetzee’s biography could spin out of her control: “by dint of a quick flip, a quick manipulation of perspective, followed by some clever editing, you can transform it into a story about John and one of the women who passed through his life.  Not so.  Not so.”  Simply put, Coetzee was a minor part in her grander life, and she’s not even that interested in him anymore, though she at least kept up with his literary output.  Therein she finds justification for her feelings toward Coetzee:

Well, cast your mind back to the books he wrote.  What is the one theme that keeps recurring from book to book?  It is that the woman doesn’t fall in love with the man.  The man may or may not love the woman; but the woman never loves the man.  What do you think that theme reflects?  My guess, my highly informed guess, is that it reflects his life experience.  Women didn’t fall for him — not women in their right senses.  They inspected him, they sniffed him, maybe they even tried him out.  Then they moved on.

In the next section we meet Margot, Coetzee’s cousin whom he deeply loved when they were children.  By the time we get here, Vincent has already interviewed Margot and has used Coetzee’s style (that third person) to dramatize her account.  In this meeting with her, Vincent is reading his work to her loud.  She frequently interjects because his product is so far, in her mind, from what she said in the interview.  

I was under the impression you were simply going to transcribe our interview and leave it at that.  I had no idea you were going to rewrite it completely.

Vincent, it turns out, has his own ideas about how these lives intermingled and his words are warping their experiences.  It’s important, at this time, to note that Vincent never met Coetzee.  He’s just a great admirer.

His next interview takes place in Brazil where he has found Adriana.  Again this section is presented as a straight interview, only this time there is a silent translator involved in the transmission.  Coetzee taught Adriana’s talented daughter while her family was living in South Africa.  His interest in her talents eventually spilled over to an interest in her mother who spurned his advances, often made by way of the written word.

You say you decided not to read his last letter.  Do you ever regret that decision?

Why?  Why should I regret it?

Because Coetzee was a writer, who knew how to use words.  What if the letter you did not read contained words that would have moved you or even changed your feelings about him?

Mr Vincent, to you John Coetzee is a great writer and a hero, I accept that, why else would you be here, why else would you be writing this book?  To me, on the other hand — pardon me for saying this, but he is dead, so I cannot hurt his feelings — to me he is nothing.  He is nothing, was nothing, just an irritation, an embarrassment.  He was nothing and his words were nothing.  I can see you are cross because I make him look like a fool.  Nevertheless, to me he really was a fool.

The next section is an interview with an old university friend named Martin who suggest to Vincent it is naive to believe that a theme that comes up in an author’s work is there because it was present in the author’s life.  The last section is an interview with another colleague, Sophie.  Together Sophie and Coetzee taught a class at the University of Cape Town, and she suggests Coetzee didn’t fully understand the history of South Africa and of the Afrikaners, again somewhat destabilizing the impression Vincent had of the man from his work.

It’s a fantastic book, incredibly fluid and fast-reading and yet complex in its many layers.  What here is true?  I certainly don’t know.  Possibly none of it.  Certainly much is false.  Coetzee’s mother didn’t die until 1985, but here she’s dead by the early 1970s.  Coetzee was also married at this time and had two children, but there is no indication of any such relationships in Summertime.  Oh, and Coetzee himself is not dead.  Despite and with these departures, Coetzee is teasing any line between fact and fiction and showing how submitting life to words ensures not clarity but more mystery, presenting his character as an aloof, awkward annoyance, tolerated, perhaps sometimes admired, but not loved and not particularly important in the grander scheme of these other characters’ lives. 

However, then the book ends in an interesting way.  We go back to Coetzee’s notebooks to look at some undated fragments.  In particular, these fragments focus on the time he was caring for his father.  They are brief but incredibly intimate passages.  And it isn’t even that the two men talk — in fact, they don’t really — but they’re in close quarters together.  it takes this book back to personal and intimate at the same time it casts in relief the loneliness and alienation.

The book opens when Coetzee is nearing 20.  If Boyhood was about the artist as a young man, Youthis about that artist attempting to fit himself into his vision of what an artist is.  The strained relationship with his parents becomes altogether worse.  Now Coetzee is “proving something: that each man is an island; that you don’t need parents.”  But he isn’t just separated from his parents.  In the opening pages, we see several examples of just how separate Coetzee is from almost anyone, especially women.  For one thing, he doesn’t trust that anyone sees in him what he hopes: that he is an artist.  It plays out both sad and funny because he wants lovers, but he cannot trust their motives.  Here, for example, is his reaction to a sexual encounter with Jacqueline, a friend of a friend:

In fact he is not carried away.  Not only is there the matter of the sand, which gets into everything, there is also the nagging question of why this woman, whom he has never met before, is giving herself to him.  Is it credible that in the course of a casual conversation she detected the secret flame burning in him, the flame that marks him as an artist?  Or is she simply a nymphomaniac, and was that what Paul, in his delicate way, was warning him about when he said she was ‘under therapy’?

Well, despite Coetzee’s misgivings, Jacqueline moves in with him (something typical for an artist, he feels).  But this relationship just doesn’t work.  He wants love and sex and connection, but he wants it to generate from the fact that he is an artist.  Now he’s enmeshed in a relationship that takes away his sleep and, worse, any time he could devote to writing.  So he’s with her because he’s an artist, but with her he cannot be an artist; along those same lines, she does not see him as an artist.  His relationship with Jacqueline is stop and start.  She moves out, and he feels relieved.  Then he allows her to move back  in for various reasons, not the least of which is because he thinks that is how a true artist would live.

Yet whole days pass in a fog of grey exhaustion.  He curses himself for letting himself be sucked back into an affair that costs him so much.  If this is what having a mistress entails, how do Picasso and the others get by?  He simply has not the energy to run from lecture to lecture, job to job, then when the day is done to pay attention to a woman who veers between euphoria and spells of the blackest gloom in which she thrashes around brooding on a lifetime’s grudges.

Although no longer formally living with him, Jacqueline feels free to arrive on his doorstep at all hours of the night and day.  Sometimes she comes to denounce him for some word or other he let slip whose veiled meaning has only now beocme clear to her.  Sometimes she is simply feeling low and wants to be cheered up.  Worst is the day after therapy: she is there to rehearse, over and over again, what past in her therapist’s consulting room, to pick over the implications of his tiniest gesture.  She sighs and weeps, gulps down glass after glass of wine, goes dead in the middle of sex.

His is not a romantic life.  Whatever hopes he has that his art will grow as he mimics his artist idols, his demeanor just isn’t compatible with the lifestyle he thinks he should lead, causing this already lonely and distant young man to retreat even further. 

As the book progresses, Coetzee moves away to England, anxious to achieve the artist’s life in a more metropolitan setting.  To live there, though, he must work.  He’s qualified to do computer programming, so he ends up working for IBM, which, much like his experiences with a lover, saps his time and diminishes his art.  But why should it be this way?  He’s miserable, and isn’t that the state of mind he’s been looking for?

Why is it a greater sacrifice, a greater extinction of personality, to hide out in a garret room on the Left Bank for which you have not paid the rent, or wander from café to café, bearded, unwashed, smelly, bumming drinks from friends, than to dress in a black suit and do soul-destroying office-work and submit to either loneliness unto death or sex without desire?

So Youthbecomes much mor than just a young man’s quest to become his vision of an artist.  It is also about Coetzee’s genuine attempts to battle loneliness and depression and to find some human touch, even when his natural instinct is to shy away.  He finally quits his job at IBM, but that means he has even fewer people to speak to: “Day after day goes by when not a word passes his lips.  He begins to mark them off with an S in his diary: days of silence.”  One day Coetzee bumps into someone by mistake and mutters “Sorry!”

Sorry: the word comes heavily out of his mouth, like a stone.  Does a single word of indeterminate class count as speech?  Has what occurred between himself and the old man been an instance of human contact, or is it better described as mere social interaction, like the touching of feelers between ants?  To the old man, certainly, it was nothing.  All day long the old man stands there with his stacks of papers, muttering angrily to himself; he is always waiting for a chance to abuse some passer-by.  Whereas in his own case the memory of that single words will persist for weeks, perhaps for the rest of his life.  Bumping into people, saying “Sorry!”, getting abused: a ruse, a cheap way of forcing a conversation.  How to trick loneliness.

Certainly this book, with all of its layers strengthened by Coetzee’s absolute control and precision, is one of the highlights of my work through Coetzee’s oeuvre (my work through Coetzee’s oeuvre being one of the highlights of my reading life).

In writing this memoir, Coetzee has chosen to adopt a rather unique perspective (which worked so well in his fellow South African Damon Galgut’s In a Strange Room): he’s writing about himself in the third person.  Where one might expect “I/We lived outside the town of Worcester” one instead gets “He/They lived outside the town of Worcester.”  Worcester is a small town, out of the way, in South Africa.  This provincial background will haunt him later on when he wants to become a serious artist, longing for a more dramatic boyhood in, say, London.  The time period is the late 1940s and early 1950s, just before and after Coetzee reaches adolescence.  I’d say this background hindered him not in the least, providing ample experience for a supreme output that also happens to include a wonderful, rich book about that very background.

As the book develops, one is, of course, reminded of James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.  In fact, in many ways, Boyhood is a portrait of who Coetzee was in youth, giving a bit of insight into how he became the author of his oeuvre.  In the book, which reads much more like a novel than a memoir, Coetzee gives us youthful impressions of terror and fascination in a variety of familiar situations – at school, in sickness, at sport — and of wonder and repulsion at a dawning awareness of words, art, and social ills.  Furthermore, much of this book deals with Coetzee’s early uneasy relationships with his mother and father.  But similarities to a masterpiece of world literature do not diminish Coetzee’s accomplishment.  In fact, I welcomed the obvious connections.

In regards to his relationship with his parents, Coetzee’s relationship with his mother is both tender and sad, rendered in unsparing prose.  We sense just how much Coetzee yearns for her, feels comforted by her.  At the same time, perhaps because of his dependence and certainly because of his demeanor, he yearns to separate himself and, through general coldness or alienation, succeeds in gradually pulling away, something she recognizes but is powerless to remedy.

He shares nothing with his mother.  His life at school is kept a tight secret from her.  She shall know nothing, he resolves, but what appears on his quarterly report, which shall be impeccable.  He will always come in first in class.  His conduct will always be Very Good, his progress Excellent.  As long as the report is faultless, she will have no right to ask questions.  That is the contract he establishes in his mind.

A central character in Boyhood, it is interesting to track his relationship with her in the future books where her absence sticks out all over the place.  In this book, the absent parent (which will also change in future books) is Coetzee’s father; he’s practically on the periphery of his son’s experience at this point in time.

He has never worked out the position of his father in the household.  In fact, it is not obvious to him by what right his father is there at all.  In a normal household, he is prepared to accept, the father stands at the head: the house belongs to him, the wife and children live under his sway.  But in their own case, and in the households of his mother’s two sisters as well, it is the mother and children who make up the core, while the husband is no more than an appendage, a contributor to the economy as a paying lodger might be.

What his father does in his absence becomes very important to Coetzee’s fate.  Again, it is fascinating to track this relationship, which has a certain degree of resentment and repulsion, and see it develop into a type of tenderness.  It reminded me of some of the relationships in Coetzee’s other books, principally the relationship between Michael K and his mother in Life and Times of Michael K. 

Another central aspect to this book is Coetzee’s developing intellect.  One passage in particular that certainly brings up A Portrait of the Artist as Young Man was the one that explored, as Coetzee grows up, his fascination with words and sounds that all connect at an early age into an intelligent perspective on language and its beautiful subtleties.

Is fok is spelled with a v, which would make it more venerable, or with an f, which would make it a truly wild word, primeval, without ancestry?  The dictionary says nothing, the words are not there, none of them. / Then there are gat and poep-hol and words like them, hurled back and forth in bouts of abuse whose force he does not understand.  Why couple the back of the body with the front?  What have the gat-words, so heavy and guttural and black, to do with sex, with its softly inviting s and its mysterious final x?

These are all fascinating and worthwhile aspects of this book, but I hate to leave without addressing something quite obvious.  Coetzee’s youth in South Africa was troubled at all turns by government sponsored racism.  In this book, we get mostly confusion, as, for example, in the following passage where Coetzee is watching a black boy on the street:

So this boy who has unreflectingly kept all his life to the path of nature and innocence, who is poor and therefore good, as the poor always are in fairy-tales, who is slim as an eel and quick as a hare and would defeat him with ease in any contest of swiftness of foot or skill of hand — this boy, who is a living reproof to him, is nevertheless subjected to him in ways that embarrass him so much that he squirms and wriggles his shoulders and does not want to look at him any longer, despite his beauty.

Of course, as always, Coetzee’s skill with language and clarity — even when clarity is painful or coolly distant (as it often is when he discusses his parents) — allows for this to be much more than a simple memoir.  At its heart it is still concerned with language and with the way language interacts with the world around.  It’s an excellent book.  And I’ll give a slight spoiler now for my upcoming posts on Youth and Summertime: they only get better.

Dusklands is actually composed of two distinct, quite different, but complementary short novellas (or long short stories): “The Vietnam Project” and “The Narrative of Jacobus Coetzee: Edited, with an Afterword, by S.J. Coetzee; Translated by J.M. Coetzee.”  As you can see, even in this his first book, Coetzee was already playing with his role as author and the relationship between the author and the subject matter.  In fact, “The Vietnam Project” opens up like this:

Coetzee has asked me to revise my essay.

It is approximately 1972, and our narrator, Eugene Dawn, is a researcher employed by some agency of the U.S. government to write a report about the use of propaganda in Vietnam.  It is the essay Coetzee has asked him to revise, though at first there is no indication why.  Dawn struggles with his boss, thinking Coetzee lacks intelligence and vision.  This is the first of several power struggles shown in Dusklands. 

We are quickly introduced to another power struggle: Eugene Dawn is involved in a loveless marriage.  His observations about his marriage show he is matched in his intelligence by his cold — and frightening — demeanor:

She wishes dull jobs on me in order that I should find relief in her.  She feels herself empty and wishes to be filled, yet her emptiness is such that every entry into her she feels as invasion and possession.

Coetzee is always matter-of-fact with brutality between people, especially when they are intimate.  The Dawn marriage is fraught with distrust and attempts to gain the upper hand by hurting the other person.  In passing, in a simple phrase in a sentence directed at something else, Dawn mentions a son.  Coetzee had depicted the horrors of this marriage so well that my mouth went dry.  I stopped reading for a moment to shake my head: no!

Before we get anything else about the marriage and the son, we get a fair portion of Dawn’s Vietnam report.  When it begins, it has an official and rational feel, even if what it says is frightening and repulsive (and all too real).  Then the report’s tone begins to shift.  As Dawn describes the Vietnamese mythic and social structure that the propaganda is meant to break, the official and scientific tone becomes broad and obviously the rantings of an insane man.  This is an actual paragraph from the end of the report (no wonder Coetzee wants him to revise):

I sit in libraries and see things.  I am in an honorable line of bookish men who have sat in libraries and had visions of great clarity.  I name no names.  You must listen.  I speak with the voice of things to come.  I speak in troubled times and tell you how to be as children again. 

When the report ends, we still have about half of the story to go, and, as the dynamics in the report play themselves out in Eugene Dawn’s personal life, it’s just as chilling as the first half led us to expect.

The next story takes us to South Africa and back over two hundred years to 1760.  Jacobus Coetzee is a Dutch colonizer, and this is his personal narrative, as edited by S.J. Coetzee and then translated by our J.M. Coetzee.  In his account, Jacobus Coetzee tells his experiences with the native tribes of South Africa while he hunted game and secured footholds for the empire.  Already the Hottentots have been forced to submit to the Dutch colonists, but Jacobus Coetzee still has concerns:

Everywhere difference grow smaller as they come up and we go down.

In this account, Jacobus Coetzee tells us of a journey he and his servants made to the interior of South Africa to the Great Namaqua, where he encountered tribes that had never seen a white man before.  Here is how Jacobus Coetzee contrasts this people with the Hottentots who have already submitted.

No longer can you get a truthful answer to a simple question, his only study is in how to placate you, and that means little more than telling you what he thinks you want to hear.  He does not smile first but waits until you smile.  He becomes a false creature.  I say this of all tame Hottentots, good ones like Klawer and spoiled ones like Dikkop.  They have no integrity, they are actors.  Whereas a wild Hottentot, the kind of Hottentot that met us that day, one who has lived all his life in a state of nature, has his Hottentot integrity.  He sits straight, he stands straight, he looks you in the eye.  It is a pretty thing to see, this confidence, for a change, for one who has moved so long among the cunning and cowardly, though based on an illusion of course, a delusion of strength, of equivalence.  There they stood before us in a clump, twenty of them gazing at six of us; there we stood before them, three muskets, mine loaded with swan-shot, the others’ with ball; they secure in their delusion, we in our strength.  So we could look at each other like men, for the last time.  They had never seen a white man.

Unfortunately for Jacobus Coetzee (and this tribe), Jacobus gets sick and is forced to submit to their care, which is far less adequate, he decides, than is due a white man. 

As was the case in “The Vietnam Project,” “The Narrative of Jacobus Coetzee” is a fine literary creation in and of itself.  Coetzee has full command over his language in each case.  The voice of Eugene Dawn and of Jacobus Coetzee are each unique creations perfectly suited to their disparate times and places.  The stories themselves are as exciting to read as they are interesting, the chain of events is shocking and yet, as it happens, inevitable. 

But Coetzee, as usual, shows that he has control over more than his language.  “The Narrative of Jacobus Coetzee” comes with an afterword by S.J. Coetzee, the editor (it was once a forward, the translator J.M. Coetzee says, but seemed to be more suitable as an afterword).  In this afterword, S.J. Coetzee cannot help but reduce the narrative to a story about how Jacobus Coetzee went into the interior and discovered new rivers and landmarks.  The rest of the chilling narrative is irrelevant to him and, essentially, he passes it off as an idle curiosity.  It isn’t shame that causes the editor to discount the atrocities the account describes; it’s just that Jacobus Coetzee’s perspective is natural, not new.  But this failure to see simply underscores what is relevant in the narrative: the horrific worldview that sits at its core and that was as pervasive in the eighteenth century as it was in the 1970s.  Perhaps this same worldview still rears its ugly head today.

The book begins with Coetzee’s masterful, direct prose describing a bike wreck in Adelaide, Australia:

The blow catches him from the right, sharp and surprising and painful, like a bolt of electricity, lifting him up off the bicycle.  Relax! he tells himself as he flies through the air (flies through the air with the greatest of ease!), and indeed he can feel his limbs go obediently slack.  Like a cat he tells himself: roll, then spring to your feet, ready for what comes next.  The unusual word limber or limbre is on the horizon too.

That is not quite as it turns out, however.  Whether because his legs disobey or because he is for a moment stunned (he hears rather than feels the impact of his skull on the bitumen, distant, wooden, like a mallet-blow), he does not spring to his feet at all, but on the contrary slides metre after metre, on and on, until he is quite lulled by the sliding.

The unfortunate person on the bike is Paul Rayment.  He was simply riding his bike to the market when, well, a blow catches him from the right.  He has been hit by a car driven by the young Wayne Bright or Blight, we’re never sure which.  The way Coetzee describes this action from the point of view of a man in shock who thinks he will be able to get through this problem with just a bit of acrobatics is fantastic.  And that Rayment is “quite lulled by the sliding” is just the kind of unexpected but perfect detail I like from Coetzee.

Rayment is getting old.  If he were a younger man, the doctors may have tried to reconstruct the knee that was pulverized in the accident; however, since recovery can take years of surgery and therapy, the doctors opt to amputate.  This brings thoughts of suicide, but not exactly in the simple way we might expect; Coetzee plays with Rayment’s motives:

He is convinced that he would put an end to himself it he could, right now.  Yet at the same time that he thinks this thought he knows he will do no such thing.  It is only the pain, and the dragging, sleepless nights in this hospital, this zone of humiliation with no place to hide from the pitiless gaze of the young, that make him wish for death.

When Rayment is released from the hospital, he is tended to in his home by a nurse whom he hates, as nice as she is.  He finally gets a nurse named Marijana, an immigrant from Croatia.  He dreams of having a romance with her.  When he knows that is not possible, as she is completely faithful to her husband, he dreams of being a benefactor who, because of his pure love towards her, takes care of her and her children.

The story is developing interestingly.  And then, out of the blue, Elizabeth Costello arrives at Rayment’s door.  For readers who don’t know, Elizabeth Costello is a fictional character Coetzee has used before.  Coetzee uses her as a stand-in for himself, similar, in some ways, to how Philip Roth uses Nathan Zuckerman.  Having read a good portion of Slow Man, the arrival of “the author” completely surprised me. 

When she arrives, she recites some of the lines from the early pages of Slow Man, and says,

‘Do you know what I asked myself when I heard those words for the first time, Mr Rayment?  I asked myself, Why do I need this man?  Why not let him be, coasting along peacefully on his bicycle, oblivious of Wayne Bright or Blight, let us call him Blight, roaring up from behind to blight his life and land him first in hospital and then back in this flat with its inconvenient stairs?  Who is Paul Rayment to me?

Indeed, why do any of us care about the story of Paul Rayment, the old man who loses his leg and then falls for his nurse.  As much as I value Coetzee’s prose (and despite how much I was enjoying the book before the appearance of Miss Costello), when I step back and think about it, I agree with Miss Costello when she says,

Two a penny, Mr Rayment, stories like that are two a penny.  You will have to make a stronger case for yourself.

Needless to say at this point, Slow Manbecomes something completely different than what it at first appeared.  Impressively, though, Coetzee doesn’t allow his story to become entirely metaphysical and metafictional; he continues to tell us Rayment’s story with Marijana even as Miss Costello makes an unwelcome guest in his house.  Miss Costello comments on Rayment’s action and inaction.  They are stuck together for the time being, and she’d rather he get on with his story so she can be rid of him and he of her.

There are several things going on here — any list would be reductive and do a disservice.  However, I would like to comment on one of my favorite threads: the idea of an author and his or her subject growing old together.  Elizabeth Costello is no young woman.  She is awkward with age, and she is tired, just as Rayment is.  Indeed, at least Rayment has Marijana to fawn after.  As Coetzee enters his later years, Slow Man is a touching and sometimes blunt look at searching for meaning in old age.

As I mentioned earlier, reading Coetzee is, for me, always an interesting mixture of delight and frustration.  I cannot put his books down because the writing is so incredibly good, and yet throughout I find myself wondering just how much I’m enjoying going where Coetzee is taking me.  Then I finish and the books begin the process of aging in my mind.  All of his books that I’ve read age so well.  Slow Man is proving to be no different — I highly recommend it.

The book is a sly reworking of Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe.  Like Crusoe (I said I’d never read it, not that I’d never read about it :) ), Foe is a story within a larger frame.  The book begins with quotation marks as Susan Barton begins her dramatic monologue.  We come to know that she is telling a writer, Mr. Foe, about her arrival on Cruso’s island, a wind-blown and rather barren island somewhere out from Brazil.  Through snippets in this monologue, we find out that she had been in Bahia, Brazil, searching for her lost daughter, to no avail.  On her return to England, the ship on which Barton was sailing suffered a mutiny.  Barton, who had been cozy with the now-dead captain, was placed in a small boat with the captain’s body and castaway.  Eventually, dying of thirst with hands hurting from incessant rowing against the current, she throws herself into the ocean, eventually to be washed up on an island.  On the shore she is found by Friday, Cruso’s black servant and fellow castaway.  For the next year Barton learns to cope with the wind and the waste on the island, constantly hoping for salvation.  This is Part I.

In Part I, there are some beautiful lines that introduce the major theme of the novel.

But who, accustomed to the fullness of human speech, can be content with caws and chirps and screeches, and the barking of seals, and the moan of the wind?

Speech — the ability to make sound, to be heard, to be listened to, to communicate, to create a history – is the novel’s main theme, particularly as applied to those without power.  We soon find out that Friday’s tongue has been removed by someone.  Slave merchants?  Cruso himself?  We don’t really know.  While on the island, Barton wants to teach Friday the ability to communicate, but Cruso says Friday knows what’s needed.  Also, Barton wants Cruso to find a way to write his story so that it can be shared with others, but he has no interest.  We never find out how Cruso came to the island.  Despite the lack of communication, in some way these three diverse individuals manage to form a slight sense of being while trapped together on the island, and their connections don’t seem to rely on words.  Barton wonders,

What had held Friday back all these years from beating in his master’s head with a stone while he slept, so bringing slavehood to an end and inaugurating a reign of idleness?  And what held Cruso back from tying Friday to a post every night, like a dog, to sleep the more secure, or from blinding him, as they blind asses in Brazil?  It seemed to me that all things were possible on the island, all tyrannies and cruelties, though in small; and if, in despite of what was possible, we lived at peace one with another, surely this was proof that certain laws unknown to us held sway, or else that we had been following the promptings of our hearts all this time, and our hearts had not betrayed us.

When salvation comes Barton is certain it will lead to a better life.  However, Cruso does not survive the journey home.  Barton and Friday find themselves lost and destitute in England.  With no money but with hope, Barton goes to Mr. Foe, hoping he’ll put her island adventure – what we’ve just read – into print.  She’s certain she lacks the skill to do it (“Return to me the substance I have lost, Mr Foe: that is my entreaty.  For though my story gives the truth, it does not give the substance of the truth (I see that clearly, we need not pretend otherwise).”).  Thus we find out why Part I of the book is in quotations: it is Barton’s recounting of the events on the island. 

When Part II begins, Foe has abandoned his home to creditors, and Barton has no idea how to find him.  Her only hope for herself and Friday is unresponsive.  This Part contains Barton’s letters imploring Foe to continue writing her story (“For surely, with every day that passes, our memories grow less certain, as even a statute in marble is worn away by rain, till at last we can no longer tell what shape the sculptor’s hand gave it.”).  She and Friday are in worse circumstances than they were on the island.  When the creditors finally leave Foe’s home, Barton and Friday move in.

Part II is where the book started to lose my intense interest.  At times it was still fascinating: there is an encounter with a girl claiming to be Barton’s daughter (it’s vague but vital to the story — the girl is a symbol); there is evidence Foe sent the girl; there is further evidence the girl is being genuine.  There are multiple observations of Friday and what appears to be his complete oblivion.  Still, I found myself just wanting the book to move forward and end.  Coetzee’s own narrative becomes surreal as Barton’s reality becomes uncertain and characters enter and leave the story like ghosts through walls.  I’m sure I didn’t give it the time it deserved, but I was getting impatient before the narrative started falling apart, and it’s hard to get back on track when it’s going to take even more patience.

All of this builds up to a more pleasing, though still abstract, Part III when Foe finally speaks for himself.  Turns out he has been giving Barton’s story a lot of thought, but he doesn’t like her way of telling it.  He tells her the story should be about her search for her daughter, something merely tangential, almost incidental, in Barton’s account and in her letters.

‘. . . It is thus that we make up a book: loss, then quest, then recovery; beginning, then middle, then end.  As to novelty, this is lent by the island episode — which is properly the second part of the middle — and by the reversal in which the daughter takes up the quest abandoned by her mother.’

All the joy I had felt in finding my way to Foe fled me.  I sat heavy-limbed.

The book has much more to it than I was able to put down here, and for that reason it is worth reading.  I don’t think it is Coetzee’s best work by a long shot, but in hindsight (after getting through the undergrowth) I very much liked the layers built upon this phrase: “. . . what it is to speak into a void, day after day, without answer.”

I’m pretty sure that even though it didn’t win the Best of the Booker J.M. Coetzee’s Disgrace was the runner up.  To me, anyway, it was the second most substantive book on the shortlist and it seemed like most people I talked to who didn’t vote for Midnight’s Children voted for Disgrace.  At any rate, I thought it might be nice to take another look at an earlier Coetzee novel that won the Booker Prize but that was not considered for the Best of the Booker: Life and Times of Michael K (1983).

Here we meet an apparent simpleton, Michael K.  He lives near his mother in a city that is getting torn up by war.  Though he’s comfortable in his routine, K decides to hook a cart up to a bicycle so he can take his mother away, back to the village where she grew up.  The book is divided up into three parts: Part I is from K’s perspective; Part II is from the perspective of the doctor who treats K; and the very short Part III is again from K’s perspective. 

As in Disgrace, Coetzee’s prose is sparse yet elegant, painful and full of irony.

The damp weather was no good for her, nor was the unending worry about the future.  Once settled in Prince Albert she would quickly recover her health.  At most, they would be a day or two on the road.  People were decent, people would stop and give them lifts.

Unfortunately, and it’s no surprise, K’s plans do not pan out.  The consequences are ugly.  But somehow, the book is beautiful.  This is one of those rare works of art that by showing ugliness gets the reader (who pays attention) to recognize, more deeply, beauty.  I’m not talking about cartharsis here.  This book doesn’t necessarily dwell on the tragedies that occur – they are presented here more like an inconvenience.  I’m not sure how it happens, but while reading this book - this book about war and about one man’s physical decline as he attempts to become invisible – during the day I looked around me and saw so many wonderful things.  Things looked brighter.  I was happier.  It was not because I was contrasting my life with that of Michael K.  It was because in his life I could see some fundamental beauty which I could then recognize in my own.  I would read the sad way Michael K passes time while alone or in captivity and feel some fundamental truth, some elemental beauty even among the ugliness of human nature.  For example, this simple passage from early in the book is simple, its momentary bliss is rare, yet for all its simpleness it shouts a message louder than the ravages going on around the characters:

[H]e was again able to take his mother, wrapped in coat and blanket, for a seafront ride that brought a smile to her lips.

I liked this book more than Disgrace.  In both, Coetzee has a way of using simple words in seemingly simple sentences, coming up with a fabulously understated style:

He had a feeling that he was losing his grip on why he had come all these hundreds of miles, and had to pace about with his hands over his face before he felt better again.

But Life and Times of Michael K felt more compassionate than Disgrace.  Because Coetzee had to recognize the fundamental beauty I talked about earlier, I felt more drawn to K and to the writer.  Simple passages like the one here made me feel like Coetzee was not merely defending a character – as I felt in Disgrace, where Lurie is almost completely unlikeable on the surface – but also working hard to get the reader to love a character that he loved:

There was a cord of tenderness that stretched from him to the patch of earth beside the dam and must be cut.  It seemed to him that one could cut a cord like that only so many times before it would not grow again.

Michael K is deceptively complex.  He seems simple.  He barely talks.  The simple style of the novel strengthens this feel.  However, like the novel itself, there is much more below the surface.  The doctor, who tells Part II, is one of the only characters who recognizes Michael K as something more than a simpleton.  His revelation is probably flawed too, but that leaves more room for readers to get what they can from the life of Michael K.

After you read the book:

I wrote here mostly about the beauty I found in Michael K.  But here I want to look at some of the horrors I encountered along the way.  When Michael K’s mother died his silence left me stunned.  He was frightened of his mother, and it was interesting that because of this he is almost scared to grieve for her.  Though he seems to be running away from the war to Prince Albert, I felt that mostly he was still trying to carry out her will, and not because he loved her just that much but because he was frightened of what would happen to him if he didn’t.  This hold she had on him made him fairly impotent when she was alive.  Now she’s dead and his body too begins to waste away. 

Did you see hope in the tryst he had with the woman at the end?  Was there some vitality reentering his life?  I wanted to see it that way, but the encounter felt too cheap.  It almost seemed to underscore the decline of Michael K.

Before you read the book:

When Coetzee won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2003, Disgrace (1999) was the first book I bought by him.  Though it was short, it took me a long time to open it up and begin to read.  Years in fact.  When I finally did begin reading it, I consumed it in less than one day, a busy day at that.

Disgrace is a very quick read.  But it’s not quick just because it’s short (though it is short); it is a quick read because Coetzee’s writing is sweet and simple.  I don’t remember getting tied up by a single sentence.  It’s siplicity on the surface is even more impressive when considering the complexity – all the allusions, all of the conflicted feelings – that is actually going on.  As an example of how fast this book can move and yet how much goes on in the lines, anything I disclose in this post takes place in the first thirty pages – and so much happens in those thirty pages, so many emotions that affected me viscerally. 

However, though short and quick, I still don’t think I get all I should have gotten from the book – so please enlighten me with your comments!

The novel opens up when David Lurie’s prostitute stops meeting with him.  He’s caught a glimpse of her outside the hotel room where they met weekly and where, until now, they’ve had a great relationship.  He wants to console her, tell her that he understands:

He is all for double lives, triple lives, lives lived in compartments.  Indeed, he feels, if anything, greater tenderness for her.

But she cannot deal with the fact that a client has seen her in her daily life, so she drops him.  His week becomes ”as featureless as a desert.”  He seeks to assauge his libido (let alone his ego) by seducing one of his students.  It is one of the most painfully compelling sections of a book I’ve ever read.  In a way I felt guilty for reading it, like I was somehow involved.  That sick feeling of guilt and desire radiates from the page.  It’s an unpleasant thing to experience, especially when Coetzee inserts cold reason.

He is vexed, irritated.  She is behaving badly, getting away with too much; she is learning to exploit him and will probably exploit him further.  But if she has got away with much, he has got away with more; if she is behaving badly, he has behaved worse.  To the extent that they are together, if they are together, he is the one who leads, she the one who follows.  Let him not forget that.

And this is just the first thirty pages.  The real force of the book comes after this, when Lurie moves away to live with his daughter on her farm.  There is more disgrace to come.

David Lurie is a character to be despised – at least, that’s what I wanted to do.  I couldn’t fully despise the man though.  Somehow I could not help but pity him and feel somewhat complicit.  Underneath the cold, selfish skin, there was a real human being.  I don’t quite know why.  I admit that I have not fully informed myself of the criticism this book takes from those who purport to know about South Africa and race relations post-apartheid.  I’m not sure how I’d feel about it if I knew more, but as I stand now, it is a book to be read for its stylistic, stark beauty and for its substance.

For after you read the book:

Mostly I have just questions here, about various matters.

What is the connection with the animals?  That was an aspect that I didn’t particularly care for honestly, but maybe I just didn’t get it.  Even though I pitied the animals, it was in no way sufficient for me to associate that pity with anything I consider more important.

I can see some reasons why Lucy was so passive about her rape and her assaulters.  But I know this offended a lot of people.  How does it fit in the larger picture of the book?  Her passivity and the somewhat redemptive ending do not seem to mesh in my mind.