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J.M. Coetzee and the Life of Writing: Face-to-face with Time
A moving, insightful biography of the Nobel Laureate and a study of J. M. Coetzee’s work, illuminating the creation of his exceptional novels
J. M. Coetzee is one of the world’s most intriguing authors. Compelling, razor-sharp, erudite: the adjectives pile up but the heart of the fiction remains elusive. Now, in J. M. Coetzee and the Life of Writing, David Attwell explores the extraordinary creative processes behind Coetzee’s novels from Dusklands to The Childhood of Jesus. Using Coetzee’s manuscripts, notebooks and research papers—recently deposited at the Harry Ransom Center of the University of Texas at Austin—Attwell produces a fascinating story. He shows convincingly that Coetzee’s work is strongly autobiographical, the memoirs being continuous with the fictions, and that his writing proceeds with never-ending self-reflection.
Having worked closely with him on Doubling the Point, a collection of Coetzee’s essays and interviews, and given early access to Coetzee’s archive, David Attwell is an engaging, authoritative source. The Life of Writing is a fresh, riveting take on one of the most important and opaque literary figures of our time. This moving account will change the way Coetzee is read, by teachers, critics, and general readers.
J. M. Coetzee is one of the world’s most intriguing authors. Compelling, razor-sharp, erudite: the adjectives pile up but the heart of the fiction remains elusive. Now, in J. M. Coetzee and the Life of Writing, David Attwell explores the extraordinary creative processes behind Coetzee’s novels from Dusklands to The Childhood of Jesus. Using Coetzee’s manuscripts, notebooks and research papers—recently deposited at the Harry Ransom Center of the University of Texas at Austin—Attwell produces a fascinating story. He shows convincingly that Coetzee’s work is strongly autobiographical, the memoirs being continuous with the fictions, and that his writing proceeds with never-ending self-reflection.
Having worked closely with him on Doubling the Point, a collection of Coetzee’s essays and interviews, and given early access to Coetzee’s archive, David Attwell is an engaging, authoritative source. The Life of Writing is a fresh, riveting take on one of the most important and opaque literary figures of our time. This moving account will change the way Coetzee is read, by teachers, critics, and general readers.
272 pages, Hardcover
First published August 26, 2015
12 people are currently reading
329 people want to read
About the author
David Attwell
17 books2 followersDavid Attwell is a scholar based at the University of York with longstanding ties to South Africa. He is currently on leave with a Leverhulme Fellowship to write a book on J.M. Coetzee. Alongside Derek Attridge, he co-edited The Cambridge History of South African Literature.
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Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews
November 9, 2015
David Attwell’s book is billed as a “literary biography,” presumably so as not to scare off the common reader, for whom it seems to be intended. But it is more like a critical study of Coetzee’s writing, organized more thematically than chronologically, and informed by Coetzee’s archival materials at the University of Texas at Austin. If Attwell has a thesis, it is twofold: 1. that Coetzee, based on his voluminous drafts and notebooks, is committed to the process of finding a form for his fiction that not only refuses conventional realism but also allows his own sensibility and experience to speak; 2. relatedly, that Coetzee, even in his earlier allegorical and historical fictions, is a far more autobiographical writer than readers have yet understood.
Attwell’s longest and strongest sections on Coetzee’s life are fascinating: his account of Coetzee’s troubled love for the landscape of the Karoo, a landscape his ambiguous class position as a poor Afrikaner and his racial status as a settler colonist and his European cultural attachments never really allowed him to imaginatively “possess” with any security; his summary of Coetzee’s extremely complex involvement, at times amounting to collaboration, with the apartheid-era censorship regime; and his examination of the genesis of Coetzee’s great Dostoevsky novel, The Master of Petersburg, in his son’s death at age 22. Other sections—on Coetzee’s relationship with his parents, for instance, or his life (during graduate school in the 1960s) in the U.S.—are sketchier, perhaps reflecting a paucity of archival evidence.
Attwell depicts Coetzee in the midst of massive struggles with his fictional and autobiographical materials. This is refreshing, because in narrating the writer’s intellectual difficulties, Attwell shows up as terminally shallow the “craft” discourse the dominates so much discussion of imaginative writing today. Finding a form for a novel or memoir is not a problem of craft—as building a sturdy table would be—because literary aesthetics is bound to ethics and metaphysics, and form communicates worldview. Of course, by the end of this book, I was slightly weary of Coetzee’s cliched notebook complaints about realism, which he seems to have a rather one-dimensional view of for an admirer of Tolstoy; but no serious writer can fail to be inspired by his agon as he tries to compose works that at once address or imitate the social world, critically comment on their own procedures, and express the author’s own passion, as Attwell observes:
Are the archives, as Attwell transmits their contents, especially revealing? I would say yes—but the archival “scoop” is understandably not one that either Attwell or his publishers would want to trumpet: it appears that Coetzee has long been more conservative than his academic reputation would suggest, and even the postmodern gestures of his middle-period fiction were motivated as much by a reactionary distaste for the affective style of progressivism as by a desire not to commit the “epistemic violence” of “speaking for the Other.” Why, for example, did Coetzee not allow Friday a voice in Foe (his postcolonial recasting of Robinson Crusoe)? He writes during its composition:
On the other hand, Coetzee’s stern admissions of his own intractable position, his confessions about what he cannot know or imagine, has much to recommend it. As the young Barack Obama wrote about T. S. Eliot, “there's a certain kind of conservatism which I respect more than bourgeois liberalism”—and Coetzee, a lover of Eliot, falls under this heading. There is no divesting oneself of one’s historical situation, not really, and Coetzee allows, in the following journal entry that may serve as the epigraph to all his works, that he will remain the “man of liberal conscience” (a phrase that recurs throughout this book) till the end of his days, even if they have to take him out and shoot him:
(If you liked this review, you may want to see some of my other writings on Coetzee.)
Attwell’s longest and strongest sections on Coetzee’s life are fascinating: his account of Coetzee’s troubled love for the landscape of the Karoo, a landscape his ambiguous class position as a poor Afrikaner and his racial status as a settler colonist and his European cultural attachments never really allowed him to imaginatively “possess” with any security; his summary of Coetzee’s extremely complex involvement, at times amounting to collaboration, with the apartheid-era censorship regime; and his examination of the genesis of Coetzee’s great Dostoevsky novel, The Master of Petersburg, in his son’s death at age 22. Other sections—on Coetzee’s relationship with his parents, for instance, or his life (during graduate school in the 1960s) in the U.S.—are sketchier, perhaps reflecting a paucity of archival evidence.
Attwell depicts Coetzee in the midst of massive struggles with his fictional and autobiographical materials. This is refreshing, because in narrating the writer’s intellectual difficulties, Attwell shows up as terminally shallow the “craft” discourse the dominates so much discussion of imaginative writing today. Finding a form for a novel or memoir is not a problem of craft—as building a sturdy table would be—because literary aesthetics is bound to ethics and metaphysics, and form communicates worldview. Of course, by the end of this book, I was slightly weary of Coetzee’s cliched notebook complaints about realism, which he seems to have a rather one-dimensional view of for an admirer of Tolstoy; but no serious writer can fail to be inspired by his agon as he tries to compose works that at once address or imitate the social world, critically comment on their own procedures, and express the author’s own passion, as Attwell observes:
The last sentence of this [notebook] entry—‘Finally, perhaps, evidence of me’—is especially revealing, confirming that for Coetzee metafiction has an autobiographical implication in so far as it is about the book’s being written. The stakes for this mode of self-conscious narration are much higher than postmodern game-playing and they certainly don’t involve self-masking—on the contrary, self-consciousness in the narration marks the place where the need to define oneself is most acute.(As an aside, it is also inspiring how many bad ideas Coetzee eventually, even doggedly, turned into superb novels: Life & Times of Michael K started as a Kleist-inspired tale of a white South African crime victim who goes on a spree of vengeance in a black township; worse than the reverse of Doctorow’s Ragtime, it anticipates—not in a good way!—Joel Schumacher’s angry-white-man film, Falling Down.)
The notebook is illuminating here because it shows that Coetzee is frequently anxious about ‘attaining consciousness’. […] ‘Attaining consciousness’ means two things: showing that one properly understands one’s materials; and bearing witness to one’s existence in the act of writing.
Are the archives, as Attwell transmits their contents, especially revealing? I would say yes—but the archival “scoop” is understandably not one that either Attwell or his publishers would want to trumpet: it appears that Coetzee has long been more conservative than his academic reputation would suggest, and even the postmodern gestures of his middle-period fiction were motivated as much by a reactionary distaste for the affective style of progressivism as by a desire not to commit the “epistemic violence” of “speaking for the Other.” Why, for example, did Coetzee not allow Friday a voice in Foe (his postcolonial recasting of Robinson Crusoe)? He writes during its composition:
By robbing him of his tongue (and hinting that it is Cruso, not I, who cut it out) I deny him a chance to speak for himself: because I cannot imagine how anything that Friday might say would have a place in my text. Defoe’s text is full of Friday’s Yes; now it is impossible to fantasize that Yes; all the ways in which Friday can say No seem not only stereotyped (i.e. rehearsed over and over again in the texts of our times) but so destructive (murder, rape, bloodthirsty tyranny). What is lacking to me is what is lacking to Africa since the death of Negritude: a vision of a future for Africa that is not a debased version of life in the West.Attwell comments rather blandly on this (“it is [Coetzee’s] judgment about the failure of post-colonial nationalism”), but its sweeping dismissal of postcolonial writing perhaps requires more commentary; what begins as an ethical refusal of “cultural appropriation” ends in a perhaps over-hasty identification with Africa and rejection of all extant forms of black protest!
On the other hand, Coetzee’s stern admissions of his own intractable position, his confessions about what he cannot know or imagine, has much to recommend it. As the young Barack Obama wrote about T. S. Eliot, “there's a certain kind of conservatism which I respect more than bourgeois liberalism”—and Coetzee, a lover of Eliot, falls under this heading. There is no divesting oneself of one’s historical situation, not really, and Coetzee allows, in the following journal entry that may serve as the epigraph to all his works, that he will remain the “man of liberal conscience” (a phrase that recurs throughout this book) till the end of his days, even if they have to take him out and shoot him:
I am outraged by tyranny, but only because I am identified with the tyrants, not because I love (or ‘am with’) their victims. I am incorrigibly an elitist (if not worse); and in the present conflict the material interests of the intellectual elite and the oppressors are the same. There is a fundamental flaw in all my novels: I am unable to move from the side of the oppressors to the side of the oppressed.Coetzee has chosen to devote his life’s work to worrying at this Gordian knot. It can be sliced, however, by dispensing with the Manichean terms (oppressor and oppressed) and abandoning the arrogant writerly mission—which goes back only two centuries anyway—to save the world. Perhaps it is enough only to observe it and to recreate it in language (the conclusion of Diary of a Bad Year suggests as much). It may be distasteful to discover in Attwell’s report that Coetzee was reading ruefully about Mao’s Cultural Revolution during South Africa’s transition to democracy; but the implied assessment of the writer’s necessary distance from popular judgment may well be a wise one. Attwell’s intelligent portrayal of this most intelligent of writers leaves readers much to think about—much of it disturbing.
(If you liked this review, you may want to see some of my other writings on Coetzee.)
November 16, 2015
here is a comprehensive review by john pistelli who has thought greatly about coetzee and seems more than qualified to speak on this book https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
unlike me, i've only read a couple of his novels, and coetzee / auster correspondence book.
but i loved how attwell wrote about the novelist's process of creating his fiction and how it changed through revision and how coetzee is very concerned with realism, with metafiction, with modernism and with his life in south africa, his country south africa, his parents and family in south africa, through a microscope at times, telescope at others, prism too,
this attwell book looks at coetzee notes and notebooks for his writings of 'dusklands' , 'heart of the country' , micheal k', waiting for the barbarians' , 'foe', 'age of iron', a little bit of summertime, 'master of petersburg', 'elizabeth costello, ' disgrace', 'slow man, ' bad year', 'childhood of jesus', and his some of his public lectures and speech at sweden nobel ceremony. has great pictures, end noes, bibliography and index.
unlike me, i've only read a couple of his novels, and coetzee / auster correspondence book.
but i loved how attwell wrote about the novelist's process of creating his fiction and how it changed through revision and how coetzee is very concerned with realism, with metafiction, with modernism and with his life in south africa, his country south africa, his parents and family in south africa, through a microscope at times, telescope at others, prism too,
this attwell book looks at coetzee notes and notebooks for his writings of 'dusklands' , 'heart of the country' , micheal k', waiting for the barbarians' , 'foe', 'age of iron', a little bit of summertime, 'master of petersburg', 'elizabeth costello, ' disgrace', 'slow man, ' bad year', 'childhood of jesus', and his some of his public lectures and speech at sweden nobel ceremony. has great pictures, end noes, bibliography and index.
August 26, 2020
(2020) I'm still glad someone did this heavy research into the author's notebooks and drafts. It's still incredible to read how a novel germinates and morphs in the writing process.
==
(2015) One of the best books I've read on the creative process, notably the revision revision revision stage.
Coetzee's prose is so lucid and terse, as if there's no excess, as if his novels and essays could not be written any other way. And yet Attwell dives into his drafts (available at UTexas) and shows how Coetzee evolves stories from ideas to first goes to manipulations of characters and plots to the final product. Attwell reveals how uncertain Coetzee is most of the time in his decisions, shows what kind of questions he asks of his own writing and of what he thinks his audience will respond to. Impressive all around.
==
(2015) One of the best books I've read on the creative process, notably the revision revision revision stage.
Coetzee's prose is so lucid and terse, as if there's no excess, as if his novels and essays could not be written any other way. And yet Attwell dives into his drafts (available at UTexas) and shows how Coetzee evolves stories from ideas to first goes to manipulations of characters and plots to the final product. Attwell reveals how uncertain Coetzee is most of the time in his decisions, shows what kind of questions he asks of his own writing and of what he thinks his audience will respond to. Impressive all around.
November 15, 2023
This starts off terribly, and while it gets better as it goes along it suffers from two big issues throughout. The first is that Attwell relies on academic jargon in place of the same type of plain language that made Coetzee popular. This is very much a book geared toward academics rather than fans of the author. The other issue is that Attwell spends inordinate amounts of time repeating passages from Coetzee's writing, which is a waste because the only reason to read this book is if you've already read and loved Coetzee's books, and also on dissecting Coetzee's intent while simultaneously noting his intent can never really be clear. There is almost nothing interesting here, let alone fascinating. The later chapters get better but not by much. Very disappointing.
August 25, 2015
A detailed, illuminating biography of J. M. Coetzee, a writer and Nobel laureate, and a thorough documentation of motivations, influences, and the writing process followed in his many acclaimed works.
A sense of self-delusion is revealed in the subject writer's thoughts about his creations: whereas the writer asserts, as conveyed by the biographer, that the process of creation involves an impression of one's self upon the art and an erasure of this impression in completing the work, in congruence with words of one of his modernist forebears, T. S. Eliot, "Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not an expression of personality, but an escape from personality," and "the creation of a work of art is a painful and unpleasant business; it is a sacrifice of the man to the work, it is a kind of death," he nevertheless says of Eliot: 'for a poet who had such success, in his heyday, in importing the yardstick of impersonality into criticism, Eliot's poetry is astonishingly personal, not to say autobiographical.' Coetzee's work, in like fashion, as presented by the biographer in this work, appears deeply influenced by his own responses to events, circumstances, social and cultural environment, and personal tragedies, not to mention what may be called his personal failings. Coetzee also comes up with a very personal creative writing process, of taking the work of past masters and remolding them with his own variations and criticism.
The work is not exactly illustrative of '...the life of writing.' It describes the subject writer's life, and his writing methods, including his notes and adopted techniques, and is thereby rather limited. It is not an easy read; both the subject and the biographer are seen to lean upon verbosity and wordiness, as for instance in 'a tremulous sense of who/what he is...' by the subject writer (a tremulous voice, yes, but a tremulous sense of self?), and in a description by the biographer, of imagery by the subject writer of lowering a teaspoon on the end of a string into a blown-up well to extract water, as 'a memorable image of survival.' Such tribute to a writer's unique imagery appears more a result of the subject writer's mentor-student relationship with the biographer than an impersonal evaluation of any artistic merit in the unusual imagery.
Nevertheless, I found the book interesting and informative. The idea, of a consciousness in a work, described within as (paraphrased): 'a knowledge of the subject matter, and a recognition of the act of writing about such matter' is intriguing. While this is described in one instance by the biographer as 'narrative structure, which is very much a story of Coetzee's search for himself among his materials,' and is rather difficult to envision as a search for a mental construct of a self among material objects and events, it can be seen as a curious refinement to the idea of development within a work, be it of characters, plot, or allegorical criticism or praise. This idea may indeed be worth further pursuit; in the words of the admitted forebear of Coetzee, T. S. Eliot, "Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal."
A Goodreads First Reads book won in a giveaway.
A sense of self-delusion is revealed in the subject writer's thoughts about his creations: whereas the writer asserts, as conveyed by the biographer, that the process of creation involves an impression of one's self upon the art and an erasure of this impression in completing the work, in congruence with words of one of his modernist forebears, T. S. Eliot, "Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not an expression of personality, but an escape from personality," and "the creation of a work of art is a painful and unpleasant business; it is a sacrifice of the man to the work, it is a kind of death," he nevertheless says of Eliot: 'for a poet who had such success, in his heyday, in importing the yardstick of impersonality into criticism, Eliot's poetry is astonishingly personal, not to say autobiographical.' Coetzee's work, in like fashion, as presented by the biographer in this work, appears deeply influenced by his own responses to events, circumstances, social and cultural environment, and personal tragedies, not to mention what may be called his personal failings. Coetzee also comes up with a very personal creative writing process, of taking the work of past masters and remolding them with his own variations and criticism.
The work is not exactly illustrative of '...the life of writing.' It describes the subject writer's life, and his writing methods, including his notes and adopted techniques, and is thereby rather limited. It is not an easy read; both the subject and the biographer are seen to lean upon verbosity and wordiness, as for instance in 'a tremulous sense of who/what he is...' by the subject writer (a tremulous voice, yes, but a tremulous sense of self?), and in a description by the biographer, of imagery by the subject writer of lowering a teaspoon on the end of a string into a blown-up well to extract water, as 'a memorable image of survival.' Such tribute to a writer's unique imagery appears more a result of the subject writer's mentor-student relationship with the biographer than an impersonal evaluation of any artistic merit in the unusual imagery.
Nevertheless, I found the book interesting and informative. The idea, of a consciousness in a work, described within as (paraphrased): 'a knowledge of the subject matter, and a recognition of the act of writing about such matter' is intriguing. While this is described in one instance by the biographer as 'narrative structure, which is very much a story of Coetzee's search for himself among his materials,' and is rather difficult to envision as a search for a mental construct of a self among material objects and events, it can be seen as a curious refinement to the idea of development within a work, be it of characters, plot, or allegorical criticism or praise. This idea may indeed be worth further pursuit; in the words of the admitted forebear of Coetzee, T. S. Eliot, "Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal."
A Goodreads First Reads book won in a giveaway.
November 5, 2015
It would help the reader of this book if they'd read some of Coetzee's work. I haven't, though perhaps after finishing this book I may do.
I found the first five chapters of the book hard going. It seemed more academic in tone than I was keen to engage with, and I didn't warm to Coetzee himself much. (Not that this changed through the book; he comes across to me as a fairly cold person, though his books may belie that).
From chapter six on, Attwell makes increasing use of the notes and diaries that Coetzee kept and for me, as a writer, this was perhaps the most interesting part. I'm a writer who struggles between the idea of outlining a novel and just getting on and writing: finding my way bit by bit. I prefer the latter, but when you work that way, unless you happen to be lucky, you can wind up writing your novel several times over, as you find more and more what it's actually about, and as the characters change, or get excised from the story.
Coetzee seems to write in this fashion, but in an even more convoluted way: while it's not entirely clear in Attwell's book, I get the impression that each novel started almost as something entirely different from the published work: main characters come and go, change their names often, situations are written out in full and then abandoned, new things are added but don't necessarily make the cut, and much more. If Coetzee worked in any other medium besides words, he'd cost himself a fortune in materials.
For me this was a far more interesting aspect of the book than the exegesis of his novels, which remain somewhat foreign.
I found the first five chapters of the book hard going. It seemed more academic in tone than I was keen to engage with, and I didn't warm to Coetzee himself much. (Not that this changed through the book; he comes across to me as a fairly cold person, though his books may belie that).
From chapter six on, Attwell makes increasing use of the notes and diaries that Coetzee kept and for me, as a writer, this was perhaps the most interesting part. I'm a writer who struggles between the idea of outlining a novel and just getting on and writing: finding my way bit by bit. I prefer the latter, but when you work that way, unless you happen to be lucky, you can wind up writing your novel several times over, as you find more and more what it's actually about, and as the characters change, or get excised from the story.
Coetzee seems to write in this fashion, but in an even more convoluted way: while it's not entirely clear in Attwell's book, I get the impression that each novel started almost as something entirely different from the published work: main characters come and go, change their names often, situations are written out in full and then abandoned, new things are added but don't necessarily make the cut, and much more. If Coetzee worked in any other medium besides words, he'd cost himself a fortune in materials.
For me this was a far more interesting aspect of the book than the exegesis of his novels, which remain somewhat foreign.
June 26, 2018
3.5 stars. An interesting, fairly academic read about Coetzee's writing process. Also you gain some detail of Coetzee's life, his relationship with his parents, his love of the Karoo landscape, being an Afrikaner, his family's South African settlement history and it's influence on him, his European cultural connections, his academic involvement in apartheid censorship, his grappling with living in South Africa and his decision to live in Australia and how important other fictional works were in shaping his fiction.
Apart from his three autobiographical novels, Boyhood, Youth and Summertime, this book shows that a number of Coetzee's other novels are autobiographically influenced. For example, Coetzee’s Dostoevsky novel, The Master of Petersburg, was written after Coetzee's son’s death.
This is a good reference book. I will enjoy reading particular sections of this book after rereading a Coetzee novel to gain a greater appreciation of each Coetzee novel.
Apart from his three autobiographical novels, Boyhood, Youth and Summertime, this book shows that a number of Coetzee's other novels are autobiographically influenced. For example, Coetzee’s Dostoevsky novel, The Master of Petersburg, was written after Coetzee's son’s death.
This is a good reference book. I will enjoy reading particular sections of this book after rereading a Coetzee novel to gain a greater appreciation of each Coetzee novel.
May 28, 2017
I will be publishing a review of this book later in 2017 in the Pleiades Book Review.
April 15, 2016
"Coetzee famously says, 'all writing is autobiography' and 'all autobiography is storytelling'."
I got hooked on John Maxwell Coetzee about three years ago when my wife's book club was reading Disgrace. I was completely stunned by the power of the novel and by the unbelievably precise prose. Disgrace is certainly is among the very few best books I have ever read. Since then, my count of Coetzee's books has reached 18, including his non-fiction works of literary criticism; all my 18 reviews are posted here on Goodreads and they are all high-rated, with two other masterpieces warranting full five stars: Waiting for the Barbarians and Boyhood .
No wonder that I have been extremely interested in David Attwell's J.M. Coetzee and the Life of Writing. Face-to-Face with Time (2015). The author - who worked under J.M. Coetzee's guidance as a Master's student at the University of Cape Town and then collaborated with him on a book titled Doubling the Point - states that the goal of his study is "to read Coetzee's life and work together". His research method has been based on looking not "at the finished works, but at the authorship that underlies them: its creative processes and sources [...]". Mr. Attwell spent many weeks reading Coetzee's manuscripts and notebooks and was thus able to discover "the remarkable ways in which [the authorship] transforms [the] often quite ordinary materials into unforgettable fiction."
Being just a casual reader I am not in the slightest qualified to discuss the literary creative process and will just mention a few of the main topics of the book. The epigraph quote from Attwell indicates a strong focus on the autobiographical component of virtually all of Coetzee's fiction work. Coetzee's struggles with the issues of realism of fiction are the other principal theme of the study. Mr. Attwell quotes Coetzee who feels "bound to produce" realism "if the book is to be written", but with each next novel seems to spend less and less time on providing sufficient layers of realism to ground his fiction in.
Yet another principal topic is the metafictional aspect of Coetzee's work, and particularly the question of whether and "why the novel should be self-conscious." The author reports Coetzee's endorsement of Robert Alter's thought-provoking answer "that the self-conscious novel is aware of impermanence and death in a way that realism cannot be." Mr. Attwell also discusses some critics' (particularly South African ones) attacks on "detachment from the immediacies of South Africa" that they perceive in many Coetzee's novels.
While Attwell's book is a must-read for literary critics and literature students as well as for all people, who - like this reviewer - are obsessed with Coetzee's writing the casual reader may find the study too specialized. Also, Mr. Attwell's writing is not as superbly lucid as Coetzee's, whose prose - even in the most intense philosophical fragments - is crystalline clear, something that might be attributed to his degree in mathematics and practice as a computer programmer.
Although I have read the book with extreme interest - in two consecutive late-night sittings - I am not sure whether it has changed or even deepened my view of Coetzee's work in any appreciable way. As an ordinary reader I am not sure I want to know about the evolution of a literary work of art before the author decides on the final version. The books, the finished "products", speak to me much stronger than the analyses of the creative processes that underlie them.
Thank you, Ewa for buying me this book!
Three and a half stars.
I got hooked on John Maxwell Coetzee about three years ago when my wife's book club was reading Disgrace. I was completely stunned by the power of the novel and by the unbelievably precise prose. Disgrace is certainly is among the very few best books I have ever read. Since then, my count of Coetzee's books has reached 18, including his non-fiction works of literary criticism; all my 18 reviews are posted here on Goodreads and they are all high-rated, with two other masterpieces warranting full five stars: Waiting for the Barbarians and Boyhood .
No wonder that I have been extremely interested in David Attwell's J.M. Coetzee and the Life of Writing. Face-to-Face with Time (2015). The author - who worked under J.M. Coetzee's guidance as a Master's student at the University of Cape Town and then collaborated with him on a book titled Doubling the Point - states that the goal of his study is "to read Coetzee's life and work together". His research method has been based on looking not "at the finished works, but at the authorship that underlies them: its creative processes and sources [...]". Mr. Attwell spent many weeks reading Coetzee's manuscripts and notebooks and was thus able to discover "the remarkable ways in which [the authorship] transforms [the] often quite ordinary materials into unforgettable fiction."
Being just a casual reader I am not in the slightest qualified to discuss the literary creative process and will just mention a few of the main topics of the book. The epigraph quote from Attwell indicates a strong focus on the autobiographical component of virtually all of Coetzee's fiction work. Coetzee's struggles with the issues of realism of fiction are the other principal theme of the study. Mr. Attwell quotes Coetzee who feels "bound to produce" realism "if the book is to be written", but with each next novel seems to spend less and less time on providing sufficient layers of realism to ground his fiction in.
Yet another principal topic is the metafictional aspect of Coetzee's work, and particularly the question of whether and "why the novel should be self-conscious." The author reports Coetzee's endorsement of Robert Alter's thought-provoking answer "that the self-conscious novel is aware of impermanence and death in a way that realism cannot be." Mr. Attwell also discusses some critics' (particularly South African ones) attacks on "detachment from the immediacies of South Africa" that they perceive in many Coetzee's novels.
While Attwell's book is a must-read for literary critics and literature students as well as for all people, who - like this reviewer - are obsessed with Coetzee's writing the casual reader may find the study too specialized. Also, Mr. Attwell's writing is not as superbly lucid as Coetzee's, whose prose - even in the most intense philosophical fragments - is crystalline clear, something that might be attributed to his degree in mathematics and practice as a computer programmer.
Although I have read the book with extreme interest - in two consecutive late-night sittings - I am not sure whether it has changed or even deepened my view of Coetzee's work in any appreciable way. As an ordinary reader I am not sure I want to know about the evolution of a literary work of art before the author decides on the final version. The books, the finished "products", speak to me much stronger than the analyses of the creative processes that underlie them.
Thank you, Ewa for buying me this book!
Three and a half stars.
June 15, 2016
i finally finished this book! It was worth it. There are places where the author gets wrapped up in the ouevre rather than making the point clear, but I've been fascinated by Coetzee since living in South Africa, and reading his novel, "Disgrace." He holds possibly the most prominent and important place in South African literature, second only to Alan Paton and Nadine Gortimer. Great insights to the three periods of Coetzee's writing life.
to-buy-find
April 24, 2016Read an excellent article about this on the LA review of books.
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