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Summary
Summary
The latest by the Nobel Prize-winning author of Disgrace is an utterly contemporary work of fiction that addresses the profound unease of countless people in democracies across the world.
Author Notes
J.M. Coetzee's full name is John Michael Coetzee. Born in Cape Town, South Africa, in 1940, Coetzee is a writer and critic who uses the political situation in his homeland as a backdrop for many of his novels. Coetzee published his first work of fiction, Dusklands, in 1974.
Another book, Boyhood, loosely chronicles an unhappy time in Coetzee's childhood when his family moved from Cape Town to the more remote and unenlightened city of Worcester. Other Coetzee novels are In the Heart of the Country and Waiting for the Barbarians. Coetzee's critical works include White Writing and Giving Offense: Essays on Censorship.
Coetzee is a two-time recipient of the Booker Prize and in 2003, he won the Nobel Literature Award.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (7)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Nobelist Coetzee's 19th book features a stand-in for himself: Se?or C, a white 72-year-old South African writer living in Australia who has written Waiting for the Barbarians. C falls into a "metaphysical" passion for his sexy 29-year-old Filipina neighbor, Anya, and quickly plots to spend more time with her by offering her a job as his typist. C's latest project is a series of political and philosophical essays, and Coetzee divides each page of the present novel in three: any given page features a bit of an essay (often its title and opening paragraph) at the top; C's POV in the middle; and Anya's voice at the bottom. C's opinions in the essays are mostly on the left (he despises Bush, Blair & Co., and is opposed to the Iraq War) and they bore Anya, who wants something less lofty. Meanwhile, Anya's lover, Alan-a smart, conservative 42-year-old investment consultant who's good in the sack, and who stands for everything C despises-becomes increasingly scornful and jealous, and eventually concocts an elaborate plan to defraud C. of money. Unfortunately, Anya is little more than a trophy to be disputed, and Alan as an unscrupulous, boorish reactionary is a caricature. While C's essays, especially the later ones inspired by Anya, hold some interest, this follow-up to Slow Year is not one of Coetzee's major efforts. (Jan.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Booklist Review
Critics have speculated that novelist Elizabeth Costello, the protagonist in the Coetzee novel bearing her name, and a character who also appears in Slow Man (2005), is the author's alter ego. Many will assume the same about the distinguished man of letters in the Nobel laureate's new novel. Like Coetzee, Señor C is a South African who has made a home in Australia. Of advanced years, and a bit lonely, he asks his sexy neighbor to work as his typist. Anya lives in the penthouse with smart, arrogant Alan, and is glad for something to do. And so begins a curious alliance, mapped out in three concurrent narratives. At the top of each page flow Señor C's far-ranging, curmudgeonly, robust, and entertaining social critiques, including condemnations of the profound moral failings of Bush and Blair. In the middle are his diary entries, and at the bottom is Anya's story. The result is a brilliantly modulated convergence of divergent points of views, and a wily unveiling of the alchemy of literature and the mesh of the personal and the political. Señor C is irresistible; Alan is menacing; and Anya, a righteous muse, undergoes a mesmerizing metamorphosis. As for Coetzee, he is funny, relaxed, and excoriating in this shrewdly charming novel about deception and integrity, shame and dishonor, crime and punishment, beauty and kindness.--Seaman, Donna Copyright 2007 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
"Diary of a Bad Year" is not the first among J. M. Coetzee's works of fiction to force readers to consider the friable boundary between fiction and nonfiction. "Elizabeth Costello" reveals its eponymous heroine, a literary celebrity, through a series of lectures given by Costello, their content familiar from essays published previously - by J.M. Coetzee. Thus instructed to conflate Costello with her creator, Coetzee's readers encounter her again, in his following novel, "Slow Man," which finds Costello taking up residence in the home of the protagonist, Paul Rayment, as he examines his life in the wake of a crippling accident. "Like it or not, I will be with you a while yet," Costello informs her reluctant host. She's brought a "hefty typescript" with her, and it appears she is the author of Paul's fate, nudging him toward fulfillment. Or is she a product of his imagination? Certain of Costello's exasperated comments to Paul - "I did not ask for you" - imply she has no more control over their peculiar pairing than does he. "Diary of a Bad Year" forgoes the conceit of a perfunctorily named and differentiated alter ego by following the late career of Señor C, who, like Coetzee, is a South African writer transplanted to Australia and the author of a novel titled "Waiting for the Barbarians." "Authority must be earned," Señor C asserts. "On the novelist author lies the onus to build up, out of nothing, such authority." Señor C is compiling a collection of "Strong Opinions" solicited from him by a German publisher. Most of these opinions represent Señor C's philosophical and political positions, though a few hold forth on literature. Authority in fiction, Señor C reminds his - Coetzee's - readers, is a construct judged by experts in critical theory (Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault) as little more than "a bagful of rhetorical tricks." "Diary of a Bad Year" would tend to support that thesis. With its text divided into two and then three separate interrelated narratives on each page - looking like a highbrow alternative to split-screen TV - the book compels us to ponder the relationship between Coetzee and his characters. AT 72, Señor C has Parkinson's disease; his eyesight is failing him; his typing isn't what it used to be. But his lust is intact, at least as expressed by "a metaphysical ache." In the laundry room of his apartment building, he encounters a young woman with "a derrière so near to perfect as to be angelic," and soon he has hired the owner of this apparition, a Filipina whose name is Ariya and who lives upstairs, to type the manuscript of his opinions, which he dictates to her. These make up the first of the novel's narratives and appear at the top of each page. Beneath them are Señor C's accounts of his transactions with Anya, who (like Marijana, the Croatian nurse who cares for Paul Rayment in "Slow Man") provides at least as much psychic as physical assistance. In contrast to her employer, Anya is body first and intellect second. Her less lofty point of view inhabits, fittingly, the nether portion of the page. Señor C's official, soon-to-be-published strong opinions - on the origins of the state, democracy, terrorism, pedophilia, animal rights, probability and intelligent design, among other topics - are followed by a second collection of what Anya calls his "Soft Opinions," which he writes in response to her finding the first set boring. The reader, distracted by the unfolding relationship between Señor C and Anya, whose jealous and conniving boyfriend schemes to defraud Señor C of his savings, finds it hard to pay adequate attention to Señor C's more edifying mini-essays. Saving his "opinions" for later, however, degrades the experience of the whole, as there is a complex interplay among the three strands, each point of view - Señor C's official, authoritative stance; his confessions of sexual desire and frustration as experienced by a man with waning physical strength; and Anya's initially reserved account of her employer's possible motives - qualifying and enlarging the other two. Coetzee's fiction - and, "Diary of a Bad Year" suggests, his psyche - has always manifested a fault line. On one side of the divide is reason, moral and sober, charged with the responsible stewardship of human society. On the other lie the passions, especially lust, that undermine and sometimes trump intellect. Professor David Lurie, for example, the central character of "Disgrace," has, he believes, "solved the problem of sex rather well." He gets it once a week, out of town, and he pays for it. But sex is not so easy to compartmentalize, let alone solve, and Lurie destroys his career and rearranges life as he knows it by entering into an affair with a student. The mind-body conflict is presented even more starkly by the case of Señor C, whose split nature is displayed on either side of a line that literally divides the page. Below his fragmented self, on the other side of yet another line, salvation dangles in the shape of Anya, compared to an angel, to God, "clad all in white," an envoy between this world and the next. A woman is, Coetzee seems to imply, both superior and inferior to a man. Generally of a different race, i.e., made of different stuff, intellectually less nimble - or perhaps she can't be bothered with the questions that torment him - she appears as an integrated being. Somehow she's figured out what he can't: how to live. How to live as body, brain and soul united. What's worse, her seemingly effortless integrity calls his restless cerebration into question. "What has begun to change since I moved into the orbit of Anya," Señor C reflects, "is not my opinions themselves so much as my opinion of my opinions." What changes for Coetzee's readers between "Disgrace" and "Diary of a Bad Year" is our opinion of the author. In this most recent "novel," we are deliberately manipulated by a form that is coy as well as playful, and it's hard not to conclude Coetzee is more invested in his relationship with his readers than in his characters' credibility and interactions with one another. "What interests the reader," Señor C writes, "is the quality" of the author's "opinions themselves - their variety, their power to startle, the ways in which they match or do not match the reputations of their authors." Perhaps. After all, how riveting can fictional entanglements be when compared with the more immediate and real relationship between a writer and his audience, especially when that writer seems to betray anxieties that he might be, despite his Nobel Prize and his two Bookers, irrelevant, "some odd extinct creature ... on the point of turning into stone," "a pedant who dabbles in fiction"? On the other hand, Coetzee qua Señor C teases, "Tread carefully. ... You may be seeing less of my inmost depths than you believe." "Diary of a Bad Year" coerces us to harden what Coleridge identified as "that willing suspension of disbelief for the moment, which constitutes poetic faith" into a willed suspension of disbelief, an act that is conscious, purposeful and informed. To want to be told a story built up "out of nothing," to have our edification with a spoonful of fiction, would seem to be an old-fashioned, even prelapsarian desire. This novel's fall from the grace of a purely imagined world is a matter of self-conscious nakedness, of insisting we see undisguised rhetorical tricks we might prefer cloaked, with artifice. With the text divided into separate narratives, the page looks like a highbrow alternative to split-screen TV. Kathryn Harrison's most recent book is a novel, "Envy." Her forthcoming work of nonfiction, "While They Slept: An Inquiry Into the Murder of a Family," will be published in June.
Bookseller Publisher Review
An ageing male writer has been asked to contribute to Strong Opinions, a book of essays by six eminent thinkers from around the world. Encouraged to expound on what is wrong with the world, these essays range in topic from tourism to mathematics, from the state of universities to the effects of intelligent design. A chance encounter with a sexy female neighbour, Anya, in the communal laundry of their apartment complex leads to the writer offering her a job as a typist. Reluctant at first, Anya soon becomes involved in his work, giving her opinion on his philosophies while at the same time teasing him with saucy looks and a waggling posterior and affectionately dubbing him the Señor. When her ambitious boyfriend, Alan, realises that she has a soft spot for the old man, he starts to spy on the Senor and hatches a plot to take advantage of him. J M Coetzee's Diary of a Bad Year introduces the reader to a highly imaginative way of reading. The three strands of the novel are set in parallel sections of text on each page, running on for multiple pages with apparently no consideration for the reader's ability to keep up. And yet, each section is so distinctive in voice and so deceptively well paced that it soon becomes second nature to flick backwards and forwards through the book, reading fragments of first this section and then the other. The effect of this sort of layout is that each reader will read the book differently and their experience of the book could also change with each reading. How immersed you want to be in each section is up to you, and you can plunge into a fine essay on national shame or extricate yourself from an argument between Anya and Alan as you wish. As the Señor airs his concerns for the future of humanity and the planet, the reader forms the impression of an intelligent, humane, dignified man with a highly developed social conscience (it is often impossible not to picture Coetzee himself speaking the Señor's words) but there is also a certain uneasy vulnerability in his relationship with Anya and Alan. This intricately crafted contrast is an appropriate example of the perfect pitch of this novel, at once a fascinating work of nonfiction and an uncompromising glimpse of what lies beneath the surface of seemingly ordinary lives. Kabita Dhara is a Melbourne-based editor, reviewer and bookseller
Guardian Review
"I must not underestimate Coetzee," one of the narrators of JM Coetzee's first novel, Dusklands (1974), reminds himself. "He is a hearty man, the kind that eats steak daily." This particular Coetzee, a "genial, ordinary" Vietnam-era American functionary, couldn't be much further removed from the character readers might imagine glowering from behind the books. Though hugely admired as a novelist from fairly early on, Coetzee made his living for many years as an academic, and is still suspected of being a thin-blooded, professorial type, sunk too deeply in pained thought for heartiness or even, it's rumoured, laughter. As a public figure he is determinedly self-effacing and inscrutable - even, or especially, when addressing things he's thought to feel strongly about - and, judging only from his recent storylines, you'd imagine his private life to revolve chiefly around power-fraught or unreciprocable passions: gloomy lusts for younger women, a slightly despairing concern for the lives of animals. As for eating steak daily, he's well known to be an ethical vegetarian. To suspicions of this sort - suspicions of personal chilliness, of what Nadine Gordimer once called a "stately fastidiousness" towards real-world commitments - Coetzee's writing tends to offer a deadpan response: it's worse than you think. Boyhood (1997) and Youth (2002), his semi-fictionalised memoirs, written in the present tense and third person, put the young would-be writer's pretensions and emotional miserliness under such icy scrutiny that Coetzee seems at times to be mocking both writerly memoirs and himself. Paul Rayment, the main character in Slow Man (2005), is reproached for being "cold" and dull by his presumptive creator, Elizabeth Costello, no great source of warmth herself. Rayment, in turn, examines one of Costello's novels. It seems to give off a "colourless, odourless, inert and depressive gas". How on earth, he wonders, did she get to be a popular author, "if popular is what she is"? C, the central figure in Diary of a Bad Year , is depicted even more unsparingly. A distinguished writer, newly resident in Australia (where Coetzee has lived since 2002), he is, we learn eventually, a white South African emigrant, a former academic, a vegetarian, and an isolated, tirelessly self-critical man. His initials are "JC", his first name seems to be John, and his publications and frame of reference are very similar to Coetzee's; he even mentions "my novel Waiting for the Barbarians ". C, in other words, is a version of his creator, and the outlook, for this version, is not good. Childless, suffering from incipient Parkinson's, he thinks constantly of death and his dwindling powers. His reviews give little comfort: "At heart he is not a novelist after all, they say, but a pedant who dabbles in fiction. And I have reached a stage in my life when I begin to wonder whether they are not right." Long before this confession, and long before C has turned out to be modelled directly on Coetzee, the reader has been nudged into wondering the same thing. The novel takes the form of a series of essays that C is writing for a collection, provisionally entitled Strong Opinions , in which six eminent writers get to have their say on any subjects they choose, "the more contentious the better". At the bottom of each page, in a separate band of text, C tells the story of his relationship with the girl who's typing up his work - a girl he's hired in part because of his trembling hands and in part because, seeing her around his apartment building, he's noticed her short skirts and "derriere so near to perfect as to be angelic". Before long, she, Anya, has a voice in the novel too: a third band of text appears at the foot of the page, jostling C's narration up to the middle. C's essays, dated "12 September 2005 - 31 May 2006", express strong opinions on topics ranging from English usage to probability. But the sore point they return to again and again - the emotional centre of C's enterprise - is the personal dishonour he feels as a result of the lawlessness and cruelty engendered by "the so-called war on terror". "To the bullying, authoritarian, militaristic strand in western political life," he writes, "the bogeyman" Osama bin Laden "has been a gift from the gods". His new homeland's detention camps for illegal immigrants strike him as being scarcely less shameful than the Bush administration's defence of torture. Both remind him of apartheid South Africa; and "the generation of white South Africans to which I belong, and the next generation, and perhaps the generation after that too, will go bowed under the shame of the crimes that were committed in their name". These, we have every reason to imagine, are probably Coetzee's views too. More generally, C's pessimism and carefully reasoned arguments against the primacy of reason fit in believably with Coetzee's work as a whole. Interesting as they are on many subjects, however, a fair number of C's opinions are, if not quite banal, then not so very different from what the average literary-type person might think while reading the latest White House expose in the New Yorker or New York Review of Books. By what authority, we might wonder, is C lecturing us on anything that comes into his head? The complaints about torture seem fair enough, but who cares what he thinks about philistine university managers or the ghastliness of the music young people insist on listening to? And what kind of moral exemplar is C, a man whose emotional life appears to centre on a power-fraught infatuation with his hired help? Needless to say, these are the kind of questions that Anya and her suspicious boyfriend, Alan, a believer in market values, soon begin to raise. And while C, in his narration, sounds like a more urbane Beckett character, Anya's lively, raucous voice seems to have dropped in from a different book altogether. Aware of, and amused by, the effect "my delicious behind" has on her employer, she's neither an exploited immigrant - though she likes to pose as one - nor an incurious bimbo. She's also the vehicle for an uncharacteristic series of jokes, most of them at C's expense. The great man, it turns out, keeps his Nobel certificate framed on his bedroom wall. His neighbours seem to think he's Garcia Marquez or Paulo Coelho. "My guess is he unbuttons himself when I am gone," Anya writes, "and makes himself come. And then buttons up and gets back to John Howard and George Bush, what villains they are." The ensuing comedy of conflicting perspectives, of high rhetoric and low aims, is an amazingly strange thing for Coetzee to have decided to write. C's political writings, which seem deadly serious, are accompanied by an attack on his credentials as a guru - an attack growing out of the questioning of the novelist's authority that preoccupied Coetzee in, for example, Foe (1986). The ethics of putting someone into a book, however disguised, are also chewed over: Anya starts to fear that C plans to write about her, and Alan develops an analogous scheme for exploiting C financially without his knowledge. Yet their ideological showdown is played out on the same pages as a series of more personal essays, written at Anya's prompting and not for publication. And despite knowing that C isn't identical with Coetzee, who's six years younger than the character, isn't childless and so on, it's very difficult not to read these essays as Coetzee's late-career confessions. Unlike Life & Times of Michael K (1983) or Disgrace (1999), this isn't a book you'd press on someone new to this great writer. But it's much more than an exercise in letting off some steam inside a tricky fictional frame. Funnier than anything else he's written, if sometimes in a rather donnish way, it eventually becomes unexpectedly moving, offering surprises while avoiding a final thunderclap with the restraint that Coetzee's readers have learned to expect. The metafictional stuff is handled with more panache than it was in Slow Man , and the devices aimed at keeping the reader off balance work well. Towards the end of the book, Coetzee conveys absolute sincerity while scrupulously directing the reader's attention to the potentially fraudulent techniques he's using to convey it. Perhaps he's pulling a ladder up after himself, but you don't doubt that, as C puts it while discussing late Tolstoy, he's struggling in earnest with "the one question that truly engaged his soul: how to live". To order Diary of a Bad Year for pounds 15.99 with free UK p&p call Guardian book service on 0870 836 0875 or go to guardian.co.uk/bookshop Caption: article-coetzee.1 "I must not underestimate Coetzee," one of the narrators of JM Coetzee's first novel, Dusklands (1974), reminds himself. "He is a hearty man, the kind that eats steak daily." This particular Coetzee, a "genial, ordinary" Vietnam-era American functionary, couldn't be much further removed from the character readers might imagine glowering from behind the books. Though hugely admired as a novelist from fairly early on, Coetzee made his living for many years as an academic, and is still suspected of being a thin-blooded, professorial type, sunk too deeply in pained thought for heartiness or even, it's rumoured, laughter. As a public figure he is determinedly self-effacing and inscrutable - even, or especially, when addressing things he's thought to feel strongly about - and, judging only from his recent storylines, you'd imagine his private life to revolve chiefly around power-fraught or unreciprocable passions: gloomy lusts for younger women, a slightly despairing concern for the lives of animals. As for eating steak daily, he's well known to be an ethical vegetarian. C's essays, dated "12 September 2005 - 31 May 2006", express strong opinions on topics ranging from English usage to probability. But the sore point they return to again and again - the emotional centre of C's enterprise - is the personal dishonour he feels as a result of the lawlessness and cruelty engendered by "the so-called war on terror". "To the bullying, authoritarian, militaristic strand in western political life," he writes, "the bogeyman" Osama bin Laden "has been a gift from the gods". His new homeland's detention camps for illegal immigrants strike him as being scarcely less shameful than the [George Bush] administration's defence of torture. Both remind him of apartheid South Africa; and "the generation of white South Africans to which I belong, and the next generation, and perhaps the generation after that too, will go bowed under the shame of the crimes that were committed in their name". - Christopher Tayler.
Kirkus Review
The 2003 Nobel winner's latest (Inner Workings: 2000-2005, 2007, etc.) is another drama shaped as intellectual argument, unhappily akin to its immediate predecessors Elizabeth Costello (2003) and (the somewhat livelier) Slow Man (2005). Its protagonist, an eminent and aging author initially identified as Se¿or C., has agreed to contribute his thoughts about the state of the contemporary world to a volume presenting its several contributors' "Strong Opinions." As C. undertakes this task, he simultaneously develops an avuncular relationship with Anya, thegorgeous young woman he meets in their building's laundry room, and eventually establishes a more formal acquaintance with Anya's lover Alan. The latter is an "investment consultant" who tests Anya's resolveby suggesting strategies to exploit C.'s evident appreciation of her beauty, and embezzle funds from his presumable great wealth. In a narrative that we read both from top to bottom of each page and horizontally, following arguments continued on facing pages, C. fulminates, Anya frets and Alan schemes. C.'s strong opinions consider the formation of political states; the current administration's rampant contempt for law and the related "crimes" of its enablers; radical feminism's attacks on pornography; the inhumane treatment of animals and indifference to their rights; the devaluation of modern culture; and the "authority" with which great writers (notably Tolstoy)render the warp and woof and detail of human experience. Late in the book, Coetzee's serial drone, the aforementioned Elizabeth Costello, shows up (doesn't she always?), and any pretense that C. is not Coetzee is airily abandoned. Otherwise, there's no development. C. brandishes his erudition. Anya is, fleetingly, intriguingly fiery. And Alan is a bloody bore. There's something wrong with a novel in which a twisted, exploitative sexual relationship is far less interesting than are dozens of pages of discursive commentary. But that's the new, improved Coetzee for you. Maybe we should blame the Swedish Academy. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
The aging Senor C (a stand-in for Nobel prize winner Coetzee?) asks lovely Anya to help type his latest book, not really a diary but heated opinions on topics as far-ranging as art, academia, and President Bush. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
