FOE DEFOE & COETZEE: one black beetle knows another

Daniel Defoe was plain Foe by birth. Coetzee was and is Coetzee. He has only one look for the camera. 

There's a new mighty volume on Defoe. The Oxford Handbook of Daniel Defoe. He would love that. He who was the eighteenth century in English letters, has engendered a handbook. I read a review in the New York Review of Books, 'The Fact Man'. 

Defoe could talk to Everybody in Their Own way. He had fingers in many pies, he'd been there, done, or knew someone who had, he was a one-man band, a self-publicist. JM Coetzee plugs into Daniel Foe, into Cruso, and Friday; into his reading. His writing literally emerges from his reading, as from Adam's rib. Gathering his own hinterland into the weave: South Africa, America, Australia. 

J.M. Coetzee looks the same in all his portraits, as if he were already a portrait, a portrait of a portrait, a stab at a portrait, three-quarter view, three-quarter darkness. Giving away less and less with every iteration.

After a swift read of the slender Foe, I started the only other Coetzee book I have, Elizabeth Costello; which I found painful. No, I kept thinking, no you don't have to do it this way. In fact, drop it all, do not pass GO, do not collect 200.

I did pass GO. I read the whole book, with a deepening revulsion/understanding. There are many ways of inhabiting books; one black beetle knows another; yes. Elizabeth Costello is a black beetle; as is J.M. Coetzee; as I am. But once we're there, in the black beetle arena of books and reading, we're as different as we can be. Difference is what makes us black beetles in the first place. We need to differentiate as we go along. Constructing and undermining with every move, every word.