Background
Our first laureate from outside of Europe, John Maxwell Coetzee was born in Cape Town, South Africa back when the country was fiercely divided between the white colonists and the native black population. Living with this unjust and racist system from his childhood shapes what Coetzee writes about throughout his career and helps him to always balance the powerful and the marginalized in his space. It’s also why the committee made sure to point out how he finds countless ways to “[portray] the surprising involvement of the outsider”
Works
From The Death of Jesus
“You have a false understanding of what it means to read. Reading is not just turning printed signs into sounds. Reading is something deeper. True reading means hearing what the book has to say and pondering it— perhaps even having a conversation in your mind with the author. It means learning about the world— the world as it really is, not as you wish it to be.”
–2020
From “Youth”
What is the point of coming all the way from Cape Town to London if he is to be quartered on a housing estate miles outside the city, getting up at the crack of dawn to measure the height of bean plants? He wants to join [the government], wants to find a use for the mathematics he has laboured over for years, but he also wants to go to poetry readings, meet writers and painters, have love affairs. How can he ever make the people [in the government office]—men in tweed jackets smoking pipes, women with stringy hair and owlish glasses—understand that? How can he bring out words like love, poetry before them?
Published in Granta (2017)
From “The Better Player”
I have played sports (tennis, cricket), I have done a lot of cyccling, bit in all of this my aspiration has simply been to do as well as I can. Winning or losing–who cares? How I judge whether or not I have done well is a private matter, between myself and what I suppose I would call my conscience.
–Letter written to Paul Auster year 2009
Message
Literary criticism of Coetzee tends to emphasize a few things: the sparsity of his prose, a degree of absurdity in how plainly bizarre things are stated, and a degree of desperation and disaster that the protagonist uses as a source of strength. In that sense another quote from his letters to Auster stands out: both an elite tennis player and a great artist elicit a common response in Coetzee: “I can see how it was done, but I could never have done it myself, it is beyond me; yet it was done by a man (now and again a woman) like me; what an honor to belong to the species [he/she] exemplifies”. In a humanity marked by a quest for transcendency, Coetzee’s work highlights how beautiful and powerful our fleeting and daily thoughts and experiences can be. Whether it be watching a backhand, biking to the shops, parenting a stubborn child, or reacting to an author’s work, that is where the power of humanity comes.
Position: #11 Winger
The main work I read for this was The Death of Jesus. The book opens with a depiction of a young boy playing as a winger. While I doubt that Coetzee’s choice was personal, it does seem apropos for the author himself. Like a speedy winger charging towards goal, Coetzee is direct, driven and transparent in his objective. At times he fails (Death of Jesus often got overwhelmed by the religious allegory rather than the more engaging humanity of a flawed father–something I know quite well), but the failures seem to drive him and his characters to stand back up and do the same thing again. You likely know what Coetzee is up to, but he can still put it past you with ease. (As such, the player he reminds me of most is his fellow South African Bongokhule Hlongwane, though the team colors I applied here suit Emelec as Guyaquil feels more of a fit for the urbane Coetzee and more fitting for the Spanish medium of Death of Jesus).
One complication with all this, I am basing my interpretation on evidence from after Coetzee’s prize winning works were published. Have you read his other lauded work? Does it change your opinion to read Waiting for the Barbarians or Disgrace? Leave a comment below…please (seriously…someone is reading these, right?)
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