Books of The Times
A Writer, a Muse, Their Laundry
By RICHARD EDER
Published: January 1, 2008
Years ago the Central European writer Ludwig Bemelmans wrote a story about a poor man who went shopping for his own funeral, only to conclude, as the salesman ran down the catalog from grand to plain, that he couldn’t manage any of them. At the end, now dead, he walks to the cemetery, carrying a single candle, his coffin tucked under one arm.
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Bert Niemhuis
J. M. Coetzee’s novel “Diary of a Bad Year” is something of a self-managed funeral, but a lavish one: mordant, funny and wise. Mr. Coetzee writes circles around any attempt to pin him down. You imagine him sardonically outthinking the Nobel Prize he won in 2003. To review him is to play Alice in Wonderland croquet, with the flamingo mallets curving around to stare at the player.
And so the aging, internationally celebrated novelist who is “Diary’s” protagonist, sitting in his Sydney apartment to expatiate upon the world, both is and is not Mr. Coetzee, who did in fact move to Australia a couple of years ago. (A tiny silhouette on the book cover manages to look something like him and something like Calvin’s Hobbes.)
He is identified as C., and he, like Mr. Coetzee, is from South Africa, which has been his fictional subject. His views are undoubtedly the author’s, reflecting fierce ideals estranged from a contemporary relativism where “is, like” dilutes “is.”
And yet Mr. Coetzee has always resisted expounding. His thoughts and their counterthoughts are bent and curled, snail-like, inside the whorls of fiction. He has been criticized for not using a public platform to denounce and espouse.
So here you are, the author seems to say, “I can do platforms too.” His C. occupies one for a while (a German publisher has commissioned him to write his thoughts about the world) before crawling underneath to subvert it. His critical expositions range from American exceptionalism to the use of torture, the war on terror and the devil’s bargain by which the state offers safety by eroding liberties; and from there to number theory, the personal afterlife and much else.
But platforms isolate as they elevate. And while C. expounds on the top half of each page, Anya, one of Mr. Coetzee’s best fictional inventions, inserts herself at the bottom, setting up a typographical counterpoint that is successively comic and biting, and by the end curiously moving.
A blend of Marilyn Monroe and the Wife of Bath, she saws away at the platform and ends up, through a kind of seduction that finally becomes instruction — her own as well — with C.’s taking a hand at the saw. Under her influence what has changed is not his opinions but “my opinion of my opinions.”
Mr. Coetzee moves through the country of old age as if it were a fresh journey, this one traveling second class. As C. explores the place, he shifts from arrogance to anger to humility and finally to something like mystical acceptance.
All this indicates what “Diary” does, and quite misses what it is: Mr.Coetzee somewhere close to his most serious, and having — and giving — lovely fun. I think of the childlike simplicity of late Beethoven on a profound return trip from profundity.
C., already entombed writing his “Strong Opinions” (the title of the first section) for the Germans, is doing his laundry in his apartment basement when an old man’s fantasy — short red skirt, glossy black hair, undulant lushness — arrives with her own wash load. Anya snubs his initial attempt at conversation. Later she confides her situation: between jobs, and living upstairs with a prosperous young investor.
C. offers her a job typing his book. He pays triple the going rate; the real bait is his plea that he needs an intuitive mind to help him. No woman can resist that, he calculates. She doesn’t; she comes to work, yet almost from the start she shows that if sexy is one part of her nature, critical independence is another.
And from here on, the pages divide: the top third, C.’s philosophical opinions; the middle third, his account of Anya, as well as his feelings; the bottom third, her account of C., as well as hers. Gradually the last two parts grow more vivid, while the opinions grow dustier. Anya expands into her reality; C. deflates, magnificently, into his.
He goes from seeing her as sexual illusion to seeing her as human. Being desired is part of her identity. She will prize even an old man’s fantasies — they are his last, best effort, after all — but she demands to be recognized for her life of struggle and her untrammeled mind. And bit by bit she untrammels his. After quitting briefly because of his arrogance, she returns, responding to his admission that she has begun to soften his opinions.
The book’s second half is a teeming counterpoint. There are the softer opinions, with C.’s private artist evicting his public intellectual, among other things, with haunting tributes to Bach and Dostoyevsky. (This is who I am, Mr. Coetzee tells us; that funeral referred to at the start is in fact a resurrection.)
There is a biting subplot about Anya’s crass lover upstairs, soon to be discarded. And there is an ever richer recognition of each other’s humanity, by Anya as well as C.
“Why should not old men be mad?” Yeats wrote. In his comic, witty and compassionate novel Mr. Coetzee tells us why not.
A Writer, a Muse, Their Laundry
By RICHARD EDER
Published: January 1, 2008
Years ago the Central European writer Ludwig Bemelmans wrote a story about a poor man who went shopping for his own funeral, only to conclude, as the salesman ran down the catalog from grand to plain, that he couldn’t manage any of them. At the end, now dead, he walks to the cemetery, carrying a single candle, his coffin tucked under one arm.
Skip to next paragraph
Bert Niemhuis
J. M. Coetzee’s novel “Diary of a Bad Year” is something of a self-managed funeral, but a lavish one: mordant, funny and wise. Mr. Coetzee writes circles around any attempt to pin him down. You imagine him sardonically outthinking the Nobel Prize he won in 2003. To review him is to play Alice in Wonderland croquet, with the flamingo mallets curving around to stare at the player.
And so the aging, internationally celebrated novelist who is “Diary’s” protagonist, sitting in his Sydney apartment to expatiate upon the world, both is and is not Mr. Coetzee, who did in fact move to Australia a couple of years ago. (A tiny silhouette on the book cover manages to look something like him and something like Calvin’s Hobbes.)
He is identified as C., and he, like Mr. Coetzee, is from South Africa, which has been his fictional subject. His views are undoubtedly the author’s, reflecting fierce ideals estranged from a contemporary relativism where “is, like” dilutes “is.”
And yet Mr. Coetzee has always resisted expounding. His thoughts and their counterthoughts are bent and curled, snail-like, inside the whorls of fiction. He has been criticized for not using a public platform to denounce and espouse.
So here you are, the author seems to say, “I can do platforms too.” His C. occupies one for a while (a German publisher has commissioned him to write his thoughts about the world) before crawling underneath to subvert it. His critical expositions range from American exceptionalism to the use of torture, the war on terror and the devil’s bargain by which the state offers safety by eroding liberties; and from there to number theory, the personal afterlife and much else.
But platforms isolate as they elevate. And while C. expounds on the top half of each page, Anya, one of Mr. Coetzee’s best fictional inventions, inserts herself at the bottom, setting up a typographical counterpoint that is successively comic and biting, and by the end curiously moving.
A blend of Marilyn Monroe and the Wife of Bath, she saws away at the platform and ends up, through a kind of seduction that finally becomes instruction — her own as well — with C.’s taking a hand at the saw. Under her influence what has changed is not his opinions but “my opinion of my opinions.”
Mr. Coetzee moves through the country of old age as if it were a fresh journey, this one traveling second class. As C. explores the place, he shifts from arrogance to anger to humility and finally to something like mystical acceptance.
All this indicates what “Diary” does, and quite misses what it is: Mr.Coetzee somewhere close to his most serious, and having — and giving — lovely fun. I think of the childlike simplicity of late Beethoven on a profound return trip from profundity.
C., already entombed writing his “Strong Opinions” (the title of the first section) for the Germans, is doing his laundry in his apartment basement when an old man’s fantasy — short red skirt, glossy black hair, undulant lushness — arrives with her own wash load. Anya snubs his initial attempt at conversation. Later she confides her situation: between jobs, and living upstairs with a prosperous young investor.
C. offers her a job typing his book. He pays triple the going rate; the real bait is his plea that he needs an intuitive mind to help him. No woman can resist that, he calculates. She doesn’t; she comes to work, yet almost from the start she shows that if sexy is one part of her nature, critical independence is another.
And from here on, the pages divide: the top third, C.’s philosophical opinions; the middle third, his account of Anya, as well as his feelings; the bottom third, her account of C., as well as hers. Gradually the last two parts grow more vivid, while the opinions grow dustier. Anya expands into her reality; C. deflates, magnificently, into his.
He goes from seeing her as sexual illusion to seeing her as human. Being desired is part of her identity. She will prize even an old man’s fantasies — they are his last, best effort, after all — but she demands to be recognized for her life of struggle and her untrammeled mind. And bit by bit she untrammels his. After quitting briefly because of his arrogance, she returns, responding to his admission that she has begun to soften his opinions.
The book’s second half is a teeming counterpoint. There are the softer opinions, with C.’s private artist evicting his public intellectual, among other things, with haunting tributes to Bach and Dostoyevsky. (This is who I am, Mr. Coetzee tells us; that funeral referred to at the start is in fact a resurrection.)
There is a biting subplot about Anya’s crass lover upstairs, soon to be discarded. And there is an ever richer recognition of each other’s humanity, by Anya as well as C.
“Why should not old men be mad?” Yeats wrote. In his comic, witty and compassionate novel Mr. Coetzee tells us why not.
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