J.M. Coetzee: The Master of Petersburg

Rewriting history is permissible in the name of art. That’s the essence of J.M. Coetzee’s novel, The Master of Petersburg, which imagines the gambling-addicted Dostoyevsky returning to Russia, under an alias to avoid creditors, to mourn the suicide of his stepson, Pavel. So convincing is Coetzee’s prose that only after I closed the novel did I discover Pavel actually outlived the great Russian writer.

In fact the novel’s idea comes from a similar tragedy in Coetzee’s life, the death of his own son. So real life and fictionalised history meet to act as a medium for the author to deal with his loss. I applaud Coetzee’s ambition and trick of legerdemain. But there’s nothing else to admire here.

Dostoyevsky meets Pavel’s landlady and starts a relationship with her, using her, one of the last people to know Pavel, as a way of keeping his stepson alive. It’s a fool’s plan doomed to failure and that only brings personal complications to himself, to her and her daughter, Matryona.

At the same time the writer is dragged to a political intrigue involving Pavel and the revolutionary circles he was part of. This includes meeting the Nihilist Sergei Nechaev, a wanted terrorist. Rumors circulate that perhaps Pavel was in fact murdered, either by the police or by his associates.

But it doesn’t matter. The purpose of this subplot seems to matter nothing. Nothing seems to have substance, except perhaps the heartfelt moments when Dostoyevsky reflects about the loss of his son and their love-hate relationship. In these moments of intimacy the novel is powerful. But it hardly breaks new ground.

The novel just reaffirms the fact that Coetzee is a prose master and that he has few equals when it comes to write about misery and depressed states.

more about this book read on wikipedia

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Summertime by J.M.Coetzee

Title: Summertime
Author: J.M.Coetzee
Genre: Novel
Written: 2009
Length: 266 pages

The subject of Summertime is 'John Coetzee'. As far as many of the autobiographical details that the general reader might be familiar with go, 'John Coetzee' bears a strong resemblance to author J.M.Coetzee: both have South African backgrounds, and returned there after stays abroad, in the UK and United States; both wrote works such as Dusklands, Disgrace, and two fictional memoirs, Boyhood and Youth; both won the Nobel Prize. There is one major difference, however: 'John Coetzee' is dead.
Summertime is an odd and somewhat creepy exercise in auto/biography and self-analysis, and while Boyhood and Youth were written in the third person, Coetzee here tries to remove himself even further -- while yet remaining at the very center of the book.
In this alternate reality, 'John Coetzee' also planned a third memoir, after Boyhood and Youth, but it: "never saw the light of day". A biographer, Vincent, has now decided to follow 'John Coetzee''s trail, and tell the story of this "stage in his life", his years in South Africa in the early 1970s, after he returned from the United States, a period during which he worked as a teacher, in various capacities, and also published his first book, Dusklands. The way Summertime is presented, however, suggests that this is not the final product, as it collects the material the biographer presumably plans to rely on in writing his work but reads very much like a research-work in progress.
It is noteworthy that Coetzee gives 'John Coetzee' the first and final words: the opening and closing sections of the novel consist of notebook fragments from and/or covering the period in question. They also include a few annotations, about which the biographer claims:

Coetzee wrote them himself. They are memos to himself, written in 1999 or 2000, when he was thinking of adapting those particular entries for a book.

The five other sections of the book each center on a different person who knew 'John Coetzee' during that period, and mainly take the form of interviews the biographer conducts with them. Some of the conversation partners offer expansive answers -- telling their stories, as it were -- while other exchanges are more of a rapid-fire back and forth of questions and answers. In one instance the biographer reads back what he has made of an interview with his subject, Margot, explaining:

I cut out my prompts and questions and fixed up the prose to read as an uninterrupted narrative spoken in your voice.

But the version presented here includes interruptions and further questions and elaborations as the subject comments on this revised version. Here and elsewhere, the biographer promises to take into account his subjects' concerns about what information is related, and how:

One final thing: if you are planning to quote me, would you make sure I have a chance to check the text first ?

Of course.

But though he promises things like: "I'll cut it. No problem", the text, as presented to the reader, appears to be entirely verbatim, and includes (presumably) all the information his subjects also wish withheld or reformulated, down to the: "one thing, entre nous, which you must not repeat in your book" (but which is repeated in this book ...). These are (it would seem) the 'raw' transcripts -- though, as in the case of Margot's, they aren't all entirely raw: in that case it is a transcript of both the revised earlier one and the reactions to those revisions .....
Some of the stories are also filtered by intermediaries, as the conversation with the Brazilian-born Adriana, for example, is conducted with an interpreter (though this is not immediately revealed); elsewhere, Vincent relies on "a colleague from South Africa to check that I had the Afrikaans words right".
Coetzee does not stress the unreliability of the narrative(s), but he hints at it constantly. The biographer, too, questions records -- though not (openly) the ones he is presenting: he reacts only with "[Silence.]" when it is suggested his interview subjects may have their own agendas -- in explaining why he has chosen to build his biographical work in this way, relying on others' stories rather than Coetzee's own words:

I have been through the letters and diaries. What Coetzee writes there cannot be trusted, not as a factual record -- not because he was a liar but because he was a fictioneer. In his letters he is making up a fiction of himself for his correspondents; in his diaries he is doing the same for his own eyes, or perhaps posterity

(Which begs the question what the hell an author who presents a mock-memoir of this Summertime-sort is up to -- and certainly confirms that, whatever it is, it is anything but reliable. This despite Coetzee's presentation, which, with its essentially documentary form, can not but lull readers into believing that some truths are being conveyed.)
Vincent explains:

I am not interested in coming to a final judgment on Coetzee. I leave that to history. What I am doing is telling the story of a stage in his life, or if we can't have a single story then several stories from several perspectives.

(The choice of provisional over final judgment is interesting: Coetzee may have been willing to kill himself off, but isn't quite ready to tie up all the loose ends and offer a summa. Just as the book's fragmentary, willfully incomplete form suggests, Coetzee sees himself (and his self-analysis) as a work in progress, with much revision of the accumulated records still needed for any neat and tidy summing up.)
In one of the accounts 'John Coetzee' claims: "I don't know any stories", and Summertime is a work of fiction so deeply rooted in the factual that it does (or at least seems to) without any pure invention -- what could be considered story-telling, in its most absolute sense. But as his biographer recognized, 'John Coetzee' is a fictioneer (and as the reader recognizes, J.M Coetzee is even more obviously one): everything is a flight of the imagination, no matter how hard he tries to ground it in any reality.
The stories that are presented here are the interactions five people had with 'John Coetzee' in the early 1970s: four women and one man. (Vincent also reveals that these are the only five accounts he will be relying on for his biography.) It's an unusual approach, all the more so because, as Julia, the first interview-subject, insists when relating her story:

I really was the main character. John really was a minor character

We essentially only get their versions -- and there is only so much they can tells about the man. Yet 'John Coetzee' remains an elusive figure to these five as well; even intimacy is not very revealing. They have their ideas and thoughts about him, and can diagnose some of his failures -- "he did not love anybody, he was not built for love" -- but beyond that he remains a shadowy figure. A minor character. (Yet he is also the dominant presence in the book: Plato is mentioned, and 'John Coetzee' is presented as a Platonic shadow. Even if, in our cave, we can't see him, we are pushed towards coming up with out own sense of him based on what information is available.)
'John Coetzee''s failures in relationships are the central issues Coetzee examines in Summertime. This includes his relationship with his father, with whom he lives. Repeatedly described as sickly and looking older than he is, 'John Coetzee''s father is a withdrawn, friendless man now in a state of decline. The final notebook entries, with which the novel closes, provide some background about the man -- and also about the burden he has become to 'John Coetzee'; tellingly, the complications are left unresolved.
More of the examples involve women, as 'John Coetzee''s hapless romantic (and sexual) efforts are described. As Julia puts it:

In his lovemaking I now think there was an autistic quality. I offer this not as a criticism, but as a diagnosis

His efforts at wooing are hardly any better .....
In a rare section where he is allowed to speak for himself (refracted, of course, through these intermediaries) he remembers his six-year-old self:

And all the time I was thinking, So this is what it means to be in love ! Because -- let me confess it -- I was in love with you. And ever since that day, being in love with a woman has meant being free to say everything on my heart.

Yet he fares poorly with these women, and poorly in unburdening his heart. It's no coincidence that what he thinks he recognizes as love -- and what he clings to, lifelong -- comes at an age when physical impossibility removes any sexual component; in adulthood, he is able (and presumably eager) to go through the motions (to Schubert, in one particularly misguided effort) but comes across as, at best ... autistic. The failures are various, but the conclusion the women reach, sooner or later, about the relationships is always the same: "It was not sustainable." (It's the final subject, Sophie, who sums things up that way without going into details; it could come across as cryptic, but it's not: little more need be said about 'John Coetzee''s intimate relationships.)
While 'John Coetzee''s writings are only incidentally dealt with, his biographer does elicit some literary judgements. Dusklands is described as: "a project in self-administered therapy" (a description that fits Summertime, too, as J.M.Coetzee uses it to come to terms with his father, his relationships with women, and South Africa), and it is suggested that writing became: "a sort of unending cathartic exercise" for him. Sophie, meanwhile, says she lost interest in his work after Disgrace:

In general I would say that his work lacks ambition. The control of the elements is too tight. Nowhere do you get a feeling of a writer deforming his medium in order to say what has never been said before, which is to me the mark of great writing. Too cool, too neat, I would say. Too easy. Too lacking in passion.

Coetzee makes it a bit too easy on himself with the self-criticism: while often accused of being passionless, and certainly always in control of his elements, he revels in medium-deforming -- including, of course, in this very book (but also in works from Dusklands to Diary of a Bad Year). And among the most revealing asides in Summertime comes when Vincent asks: "Am I taking too many liberties ?"
Does Coetzee take too many liberties ? This is a very elaborate game: so obviously based on fact, twisted into fiction (especially in removing himself from the scene by literally wiping himself from the face of the earth), the presentation meant to look almost sloppy -- like a set of notes waiting to be edited into a book -- yet obviously very painstakingly and carefully put together like this. The overlay of fact and fiction remains uncomfortable, but then this is meant to be a very uncomfortable book (as the descriptions of his love-interests alone would assure). Yet it's hard also not to see it as a vanity project.
Coetzee is an incredibly talented writer and a master craftsman -- and, yes, this is a meticulously crafted book, and one of its weaknesses is that it is so obviously a construct. Summertime is fascinating, but leaves one very uneasy -- about everything from Coetzee himself to the very idea of fiction and autobiography.

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- M.A.Orthofer, 5 September 2009
- www.complete-review.com

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J.M. Coetzee and his censors

J.M. Coetzee cuts a surprisingly dashing figure in person. Speaking last week at the University of East Anglia, as part of UEA’s New Writing Worlds season, Coetzee took to the stage with a loose walk, even a subtle swagger, in a perfectly pressed suit. He spoke on censorship, and then gave readings from two of his early novels, In the Heart of the Country (1977) and Waiting for the Barbarians (1980). His delivery was nuanced and witty, albeit with a sense of private restraint. At one point in the evening, I even saw him laugh.

Writing under the threat of censorship, Coetzee has said, is ‘like being intimate with someone who does not love you’, someone waiting for you to slip up, someone who measures your mistakes and then runs to tell their friends. Censorship has long been an obsession of his, but his attitudes have always been marked by subtlety. His essays on the subject, collected in Giving Offense (1996), ‘do not,’ he wrote, ‘constitute an attack on censorship’. Coetzee’s tone is always investigative and probing. With humility he wrote that ‘I cannot find it in myself to align myself with the censor… the dark-suited, bald-headed figure, with his pursed lips and his red pen’.

But as Coetzee explained last week – and as Peter D. McDonald reported in the TLS in 2000 (it’s surprising that Coetzee claims to have heard of the public existence of the censors’ internal reports only last year) – the reality of the author’s run-ins with the censors belies the popular image. Not only were the censors complimentary of the books – for example, one censor called In the Heart of the Country ‘outstandingly well-written’ – but they were themselves sophisticated readers known to Coetzee. Among them was H. van der Merwe Scholz, a professor at the University of Cape Town, where Coetzee also taught. Another was Anna M. Louw, herself a novelist based in the city. These censors were part of Coetzee’s intellectual and social world, drawn from the small South African intelligentsia who, Coetzee suggested, considered themselves to be ‘guardians of the Republic of Letters… book reviewers to the power of n’ protecting a space for literature from a philistine state.

But you’ll find no gratitude in Coetzee, no dedications in his books to some censor’s bureaucratic serial number. Here are some choice fragments of the censors’ reports on In the Heart of the Country, a novel in which there is sex – both consensual and forced – between white and black characters: there are ‘traces of protest literature’; the sexual intercourse ‘across the colour bar’ is ‘so firmly interwoven, even overwoven, by the sometimes almost hermetic style, that it won’t give any offence’; the novel will be ‘read and enjoyed only by intellectuals’; ‘it is difficult to abstract reality out of the spinster’s flights of imagination’. Despite In the Heart of the Country’s troubling and transgressive content, in the censors’ view the novel was rendered innocuous by a literary quality which curtailed the book’s likely readership. A classic defence.

So how did it feel for a writer who once said that he considered it ‘a badge of honour to have a book banned in South Africa’ to find out that the state’s literary representatives – his unloving readers – were actually on his side? How are we to interpret the disdain and sarcasm that spiked Coetzee’s voice as he quoted these lines?

The extract he read from In the Heart of the Country – the rich, speculative, Beckettian monologue of Magda, a lonely, disused and mistreated daughter on a farm in the middle of the Karoo – is telling. ‘I am a black widow, in mourning for the uses I was never put to’, the extract began. ‘But I have another sense of myself, glimmering tentatively somewhere in my inner darkness: myself as a sheath, as a matrix, as protectrix of a vacant inner space.’

But Magda’s protective retreat – her ‘sense of election’ – is weighed down in darker moments. She wonders ‘that if only I had a good man to sleep at my side, and give me babies all would be well… a man whom I would vow to bend down to a little lower, slave for a little harder than another woman would, whom I would have to disrobe for on Saturday nights, in the dark, so as not to alarm him, and arouse, if the arts of arousal can be learned, and guide to the right hole, rendered penetrable with a gob of chickenfat from a pot at the bedside’.

Here are sceptical attitudes to marriage and stark references to sex framed by a sophisticated speculative device: the ‘spinster’s flights of imagination’ that the censors thought exonerated the book from obscenity. But as a ‘protectrix of vacant inner space’ the speculation is part of the protest, an assertion of a controlling intelligence able to resist what Magda describes as ‘the bucolic comedy… not to be explained away by poverty, degeneracy, torpor or sloth’. The censors had excused the novel by privileging its literariness. But in so doing they had missed its power.

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source: www.granta.com

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J. M. Coetzee

Novelist, critic and academic John Michael Coetzee is a leading South African intellectual who has made a significant contribution to contemporary South African culture. One of a number of youthful, dissident literary voices speaking against the apartheid regime in the 1970s and 1980s, Coetzee's distinctive prose was identified early on as one of the most eloquent and radical of the period. His work has been compared favourably with Nabokov, Kafka and Conrad, and by the time of mature works such as Foe (1986) he had already achieved international acclaim.

Much of Coetzee's writing reflects either directly or indirectly on recent events unfolding within South African society. Coetzee's task is not an easy one, considering the rapid, often traumatic changes currently transforming and dividing the country. Yet, as his recent Booker Prize-winning novel, Disgrace (1999), demonstrates, Coetzee is a writer ready to meet the challenge. At the centre of Disgrace stands 52-year-old David Lurie, an English professor who spends more time plotting romance with his female students than on the Romantic poetry he is meant to be teaching them. Eventually found out and disgraced by the University, the professor retreats to his daughter's isolated small holding. The personal differences between David and his daughter unfold against this backdrop as tensions rise within the recently emancipated local community. Coetzee's unforgiving vision of South Africa exposes the insecurities of a floundering, but still dominant white culture.

Disgrace illuminates two of the key concerns of Coetzee's work: the historical motivations behind colonialism and its legacies in the post-colonial era. For Coetzee the post-colonial does not signal the formal disintegration of empire, but rather a new, and in many respects more insidious phase of colonisation. For example, his debut novel, Dusklands (1974) comprises two novellas that evoke apparently discrete historical events, one colonial and the other post-colonial, in a manner that clearly asks us to reflect upon their relationship to one another and to contemporary South Africa more generally. The first handles America's part in Vietnam. The second is set 200 years earlier and focuses on a Boer settler in the 1700s. The very different protagonists of these narratives: Eugene Dawn (an expert in psychological warfare) and Coetzee (an adventurer and pioneer), turn out to be involved in strikingly similar forms of oppression.

It is this kind of relationship between oppressor and oppressed in the second part of Dusklands that also structures one of Coetzee's most powerful, disturbing and successful works to date: Waiting for the Barbarians (1980). The novel, which is on one level an exploration of the relationship between barbarity and civilisation, takes its title from a poem by the Greek poet Constantine Cavafy. Winning the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, the spare, razor sharp prose celebrated in Waiting for the Barbarians has become a trademark of Coetzee's later fiction. Set in an unspecified frontier land, a desert landscape at indeterminate point in time, the novel is an allegorical exploration of the relationship between coloniser and colonised. The Magistrate, who is in charge of the frontier settlement, finds himself caught between the empire that employs him and the barbarians for whom he feels increasing sympathy. Through the conflicted perspective of the Magistrate it becomes apparent that the barbarians are not simply a population 'out there' beyond the frontier occupied by the empire. The shocking, barbaric violence that Colonel Joll deals out to an elderly barbarian and a young child in the opening pages works to draw into question the very distinction between civilised and savage. The barbarians, it would seem, lie at the heart of the very empire that constructs them as other.

Waiting for the Barbarians was followed by the brilliant Booker Prize winning Life & Times of Michael K (1983). The allegorical abstractions of Coetzee's Barbarians are exchanged here for a moving, intimate account of Michael K and his mother. The plight of these two characters, both of whom are physically disabled, gets worse as they find themselves without a secure home or income in a South Africa torn apart by civil war. A dream of a better life in the country motivates their decision to leave the city behind. Their tortuous journey out of Cape Town (Michael pushes his mother in a wheelbarrow) offers little sign of liberation or escape. Michael's mum dies, along with the dream they shared, long before they reach the dreamed of destination. Like Disgrace, the novel evokes a rural retreat, an idyllic setting that ultimately fails to materialise and resolve the problems of the protagonist. (Escape, incidentally, is also the organising theme of Coetzee's most recent novel, Youth: Scenes from Provincial Life II (2002)). These are often bleak uncompromising works of fiction in which resolutions tend to replace solutions.

Coetzee's critically acclaimed novel Foe signals a temporary departure from the South African landscape. A short, powerful book, it reinvents the story of Defoe's Robinson Crusoe from within the city of London. Re-imagining a canonical novel of British imperialism, it adopts and adapts a distinct strategy within postcolonial fiction (including Jean Rhys' Wide Sargasso Sea and Morag Gunn's Prospero's Child), as it writes back to the culture of the coloniser. Foe is ultimately a tale about tale telling: the female narrator, Susan Barton, tells her story in order to find somebody who will publish it. Yet for all its richness and variety of voice, Foe is most notably a novel about silence, the silence of Friday, whose voice Coetzee refuses to represent. Through the silent centre of this text, Coetzee manages to expose the extent to which language, too, is a key instrument of colonisation.

More recently, in work like The Master of Petersburg (1994), Coetzee signals his indebtedness to other literary figures and traditions notably the work of Dostoevsky and Crime and Punishment. Coetzee's various influences can also be found within his critical writing, of which Stranger Shores: Literary Essays 1986-1999 (2001) is an excellent recent example. Bringing together 29 essays he includes writers as varied as T. S. Eliot, Defoe, Turgenev, Kafka, Rushdie, Gordimer and Lessing, not to mention an account of the 1995 Rugby World Cup.

Biography

Professor J. M. Coetzee was born in South Africa in 1940. He studied at the University of Cape Town and the University of Texas, after which he taught at the State University of New York in Buffalo. He returned home to South Africa to take up a series of positions at the University of Cape Town, the last being Distinguished Professor of Literature. During his latter years there, he also travelled frequently to teach at universities in the US.



His first published book was Dusklands (1974), and this was followed by several further novels including In the Heart of the Country (1977), winner of the Central News Agency (CNA) Literary Award and filmed as Dust in 1985; Life & Times of Michael K (1983) and Disgrace (1999), both winners of the Booker Prize for Fiction; and Elizabeth Costello: Eight Lessons (2003). His most recent novels are Slow Man (2005) and Diary of a Bad Year (2007).



J. M. Coetzee also writes non-fiction. White Writing: On the Culture of Letters in South Africa (1988) is a collection of essays on South African literature and culture, and Doubling the Point: Essays and Interviews (1992) is a collection of essays and interviews with David Attwell. His books Boyhood: Scenes from Provincial Life (1997) and Youth: Scenes from Provincial Life II (2002) are both fictionalised memoirs. He is also a translator of Dutch and Afrikaans literature.



J. M. Coetzee emigrated to Australia in 2002, where he has an honorary position at the University of Adelaide. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2003.





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Genres (in alphabetical order)

Autobiography, Essays, Fiction, Non-fiction




Bibliography

Dusklands Ravan Press (Johannesburg), 1974

In the Heart of the Country Secker & Warburg, 1977

Waiting for the Barbarians Secker & Warburg, 1980

Life & Times of Michael K Secker & Warburg, 1983

A Land Apart: A South African Reader (editor with André Brink) Faber and Faber, 1986

Foe Secker & Warburg, 1986

White Writing: On the Culture of Letters in South Africa Yale University Press, 1988

Age of Iron Secker & Warburg, 1990

Doubling the Point: Essays and Interviews Harvard University Press, 1992

The Master of Petersburg Secker & Warburg, 1994

Giving Offense: A Study of Literary Censorship University of Chicago Press, 1996

Boyhood: Scenes from Provincial Life Secker & Warburg, 1997

Disgrace Secker & Warburg, 1999

The Lives of Animals Princeton University Press, 1999

Stranger Shores: Literary Essays 1986-1999 Secker, 2001

Youth: Scenes from Provincial Life II Secker & Warburg, 2002

Elizabeth Costello: Eight Lessons Secker & Warburg, 2003

Landscape with Rowers: Poetry from the Netherlands (translator) Princeton University Press, 2004

Slow Man Secker & Warburg, 2005

Diary of a Bad Year Secker & Warburg, 2007


* * Read about books by J. M. Coetzee at encompassculture.com - the British Council's book database and global online book club
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Prizes and awards

1977 Central News Agency (CNA) Literary Award (South Africa) In the Heart of the Country

1980 Central News Agency (CNA) Literary Award (South Africa) Waiting for the Barbarians

1980 James Tait Black Memorial Prize (for fiction) Waiting for the Barbarians

1981 Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize Waiting for the Barbarians

1983 Booker Prize for Fiction Life & Times of Michael K

1984 Central News Agency (CNA) Literary Award (South Africa) Life & Times of Michael K

1984 Prix Fémina Etranger (France) Life & Times of Michael K

1987 Jerusalem Prize Foe

1990 Sunday Express Book of the Year Age of Iron

1995 Irish Times International Fiction Prize The Master of Petersburg

1998 Lannan Literary Award (Fiction)

1999 Booker Prize for Fiction Disgrace

2000 Commonwealth Writers Prize (Overall Winner, Best Book) Disgrace

2003 Nobel Prize for Literature

2006 Commonwealth Writers Prize (Africa Region, Best Book) (shortlist) Slow Man

2007 International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award (shortlist) Slow Man

Source: http://www.contemporarywriters.com

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