The Mumpsimus

This is a book that will need to be reread. Until then, some notes.

Diary of a Bad Year is immediately impressive simply because it isn't incoherent. That may sound like faint praise, but in this case it is not, because J.M. Coetzee has decided to structure this novel as three voices speaking, mostly, at once. The first pages are split between a top section and a bottom section, with the top devoted to short essays about current events and the bottom devoted to the diary of the writer of those essays, a South African novelist known around his apartment building in Australia as "Señor C". On page 25, a third section is added to each page: the diary of a woman named Anya, who becomes the typist for the novelist's opinions.

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,…

I had been awaiting J.M. Coetzee's new novel, Slow Man, with both excitement and dread. It is his first novel to be published since he won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2003 (his previous book, Elizabeth Costello, came out just before the announcement, if I remember correctly), and oftentimes the books that Nobel winners publish after they have been enlaureated are, well, feeble.

Slow Man is not feeble, and it is likely to find mildly passionate admirers and fiercely passionate detractors -- in fact, among reviewers, it already has done so, as shown by the roundup of reviews at The Complete Review. Coetzee has often been controversial, and even his best novels -- which I would say are Waiting for the Barbarians, Life and Times of Michael K, and Disgrace -- have been seen by some readers as awkward, excessively abstract, schematic, racist, sexist, too political, not political enough, etc. Slow Man will not win over anyone who has disliked Coetzee's work previously, and it…

I've been reading around in Derek Attridge's recent book J. M. Coetzee and the Ethics of Reading : Literature in the Event, a tremendously insightful study not only of Coetzee's fiction, but of the implications and structures of writing and literature in the contemporary world. (ReadySteadyBook has posted the first chapter along with a short interview with Attridge.) Each chapter takes a somewhat different approach to reading Coetzee's work, but each approach involves close and specific readings of the texts, readings that are informed by a broad knowledge of Coetzee's nonfiction as well as the historical, political, and social background each book was written and received in. What Attridge has done, really, is provide a model for a kind of literary criticism that is based on some of the tenets of aestheticism and New Criticism, but is balanced with other types of reading and interpreting that bring in various kinds of context: history, politics, economics, ethi…

The announcement that J.M. Coetzee has won the Nobel Prize for Literature is welcome news -- Coetzee is a brilliant, challenging writer, certainly one of the best alive -- and the response to his most recent book, Elizabeth Costello (due to be released in the U.S. October 16), which is sort of a collection of essays disguised as a novel with occasional elements of memoir, shows that the SF field is not the only one challenged and hampered by genre boundaries.

Though, because it hasn't yet been released, I haven't read all of Elizabeth Costello yet, three parts of it have been available for a few years: two chapters of the book The Lives of Animals are included in Elizabeth Costello as well as an essay/story, "What is Realism", part of which has been excerpted by The Guardian. I have read all of these, and look forward to reading the full book.

I thought about the SF world when I read Adam Mars-Jones's review for The Observer of Elizabeth Costello, a review title…