Diary of a Bad Year
Such a structure is a recipe for confusion, but it is a testament to Coetzee's skill that the novel is always readable and often compelling. We have the choice of sticking with one of the sections for as long as we want to keep flipping pages, or we can read the pages top to bottom, drifting between voices. I mostly did the latter, even when, as happens toward the middle of the book, the sections began to stray parts of their sentences across multiple pages, providing no convenient spot to pause.
In his insightful New Yorker review, James Wood says, "In truth, one reads the top section of each page with mounting excitement, and the bottom two sections rather dutifully," but my experience was exactly the opposite -- the "Strong Opinions" (as, a la Nabokov
Coetzee is also once again playing with our desire to match writer to writings. He's done this from his very first book, Dusklands
Diary of a Bad Year, though, is a much less frustrating book to read than many of its predecessors, and this is, in some ways, its weakness. Coetzee's least traditional books frustrate us by jumping out of the way of our genre and narrative expectations; his more straightforward books frustrate us with their moral complexity, their brutal details, their cold eye toward a world of everyday atrocities. Some of Coetzee's books frustrate us by appearing to be allegories and then refusing to be so; some frustrate by undermining our sense of history and reality in ways that can't be summed up in soundbytes; some frustrate by objectively presenting deeply flawed and even repulsive protagonists. It is a productive and exciting frustration, the sort of frustration the greatest literature provides -- an effect that cannot be summed up, but only pointed toward and experienced. For a reader not much interested in the stories Diary of a Bad Year has to tell, I expect the book is more numbing than frustrating; for a reader, like me, who finds it all quite interesting there is no frustration at all -- this is probably as close to a page-turning romp as Coetzee is ever likely to write. The effect, then, of reading the book is a perfectly pleasurable one, but Diary of a Bad Year is less of a provocation to thought and feeling than Coetzee's other, more unsettling, books.
Nonetheless, Diary of Bad Year is an extraordinary book, and even if I think it offers less than some of Coetzee's best work, that is very light criticism: few living writers possess Coetzee's mix of intelligence and skill, and he is one of the few writers I can think of where I can't imagine ever calling any book his "worst", even though, as with any writer, he has books that are better than others. As I said at the beginning, this one cries out for rereading, and I look forward to entering its pages again.