Premier Rock Forum

I'm reading Disgrace right now and am not entirely sure how much I enjoy it.

I run hot and cold on his writing. The most stoic guy I've ever met.

TrashAGoGo wrote:I'm reading Disgrace right now and am not entirely sure how much I enjoy it.

This is a good sign; this is how I felt after reading most of his stuff.

Then I decided he's terrific.

When talking about great living writers I always forget about him and Peter Carey.

I need to stop forgetting.

Elizabeth Costello and Slow Man are both weird and good recent titles.

I've only read Disgrace and found it excellent.

I finished Disgrace yesterday. The last eighty pages or so drove it deeply into NOT CRAP territory.

I read Elizabeth Costello on a whim first, and was blown away. That book immediately took me by surprise and impressed me in a way few have in recent years. So I was all pumped up to follow it with Disgrace, which got so much hype...and felt pretty meh initially. It's still nowhere near as great for me as Elizabeth Costello, but it has grown a little on me...Coetzee is good at writing with such a quiet style you almost forget he's countering pretty basic given social foundations. I say almost because he simply states his characters' unorthodox/devil's advocate positions over and over, just in a simple way. He's a big-d Difficult writer in the lit theory sense, and though he's not a close-to-my-personal-heart favorite he's definitely not crap. Stark and hence enigmatically provocative.

If you're a doof and have realplayer installed on your computer, you can watch a lenghty interview with John Coetzee here.

He's something else.

I grow tired authors who write book after book about letching old men taught by age and infirmity what their narcissism has cost them. Coetzee is one of them. Roth is another.

Slow Man is kind of a mess, but the New Yorker condensed it in to a short story called “The Blow” which is dazzling.

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.

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.

He lies stretched out, at peace. It is a glorious morning. The sun's touch is kind. There are worse things than letting oneself go slack, waiting for one's strength to return. In fact, there might be worse things than having a quick nap. He closes his eyes; the world tilts beneath him, rotates; he goes absent.

Once, briefly, he comes back The body that had flown so lightly through the air has grown ponderous, so ponderous that for the life of him he cannot lift a finger. And there is someone looming over him, cutting off his air, a youngster with wiry hair and spots along his hairline. "My bicycle," he says to the boy, enunciating the difficult word syllable by syllable. He wants to ask what has become of his bicycle, whether it is being taken care of, since, as is well known, a bicycle can disappear in a flash; but before those words will come he is gone again.


They did the same thing for Safran-Foer’s mostly insufferable Everything Is Illuminated.

tocharian wrote:I grow tired authors who write book after book about letching old men taught by age and infirmity what their narcissism has cost them. Coetzee is one of them. Roth is another.

Ha, I completely agree about this phenomenon, and the ultimate guilty party is John Updike. If I have to read one more line in a review for his upcoming 100millionthwhatever book of the season about evil nubile jailbait and even more evil flagging geriatric erections I will flip. Funny enough, when I think of Coetzee that's not the first thing that comes to mind that doesn't square with me. The endless vegetarian debate does though...