J. M. Coetzee, Booker books

Whenever people ask what I read I start by exclusion: I don't read books in the headlines, except long afterwards. Disgrace by J. M. Coetzee won the Booker Prize in 1999, and only now, in 2025, I read it, and find myself impatient with the plottedness, careful and incisive as it is, historical and compassionate, forcefully engaged with maleness and its needs, mindful of history, careful —and distracted — with family.  

In the last week or two I have read Coetzee's three autobiographical books: Boyhood, Youth, and Summertime, and dipped into his correspondence with Paul Auster.  How he dealt with himself there is somehow more palatable than the fiction structure built in Disgrace around David Lurie, Communications Lecturer, twice divorced, etc, to allow him to think around himself. I couldn't take the opera that Professor Lurie was writing about Byron's latter years. Does he really need to concoct an opera around his baser instincts.

That's why I don't read Booker Prize novels. I feel forced into a bottomless query. I'd rather be out routing compost heaps. 

BOYHOOD: inside the Coetzee chill

When I was sixteen there were two new English teachers at school: Mr Harrison was genial and engaging from day one, a cricketer on an open wicket; Mr Gough was gangly, awkward, reticent, an odd boy who didn't like sport. Mr Gough is the one I remember because it took a while. I don't remember what we were reading with him, I remember the tenor of what he said, the reserve and yet desire to say it as simply as possible.

Boyhood, the first volume of J.M. Coetzee's trilogy, reminded me of Mr Gough, and of myself. How generous/free are we able to be in telling our early lives? 

It takes a while. 

I have taken Coetzee sparingly for about twenty-five years and only now thought to read about his growing up in South Africa: small town astringent, fearful, correct, understanding little, foreseeing every tiny disaster, every humiliation. 

So that is what is at stake. That is why he never makes a sound in class. That is why he is always neat, why his homework is always done, why he always knows the answer. He dare not slip. If he slips, he risks being beaten; and whether he is beaten or whether he struggles against being beaten, it is all the same, he will die.

Young Coetzee is aware that if he could break the spell of terror, slip up, take one beating, he would come out the other side a normal boy. Like Pinocchio, who dreamed of being a real boy. 

Boyhood ends with a consideration of death.

He does not like to think of death. He would prefer it if, when people got old and sick, they simply stopped existing and disappeared. He does not like ugly old bodies; the thought of old people taking off their clothes makes him shudder.  ....

His own death is a different matter. He is always somehow present after his death, floating above the spectacle, enjoying the grief of those who cased it and who, now that it is too late, wish he were still alive.

 It took this long to get into Coetzee because I recognise and don't entirely like what I see in his mirror.

The Library at Castlemartyr Resort

The Library at Castlemartyr may be my home from home: there are six sprinklers and one smoke alarm in the ceiling, the sofa fabric is fifties green and pale sateen, the flowers are white carnation with baby breath, one flask per table.

I had saved The Pole for our stay at Castlemartyr. J.M. Coetzee, in portrait as in pages, is forbidding, and so is the narrative; we ease into it, unwillingly at first. We accompany Mr Coetzee's gradual acceptance of the story he tells, his easing into it by numbering short paragraphs, then longer pages, till the numbers are no different from chapter headings, and the chill gives way, at the last, to tenderness. 

The Pole is a Polish pianist with an unpronounceable name, a Chopin specialist. The woman is Beatriz. Likened, and not, to Dante's Beatrice.

Where do they come from, the tall Polish pianist and the elegant woman with the gliding walk, the banker's wife who occupies her days in good works? All year they have been knocking at the door, wanting to be let in or else dismissed and laid to rest. Now, at last, has their time come.

The books in the library at Castlemartyr are faded Dickens, book club Daphne du Maurier, a little Shakespeare (and I saw a mentor's Macbeth by a table in the hall) (our room has a softened hardback Irish  Civil War on the table under the tv). There are coffee table books about baking and preserving, a florid volume of Dangerous things for Boys. The only other person there that afternoon was a young man, recently a boy, at his laptop who never looked up. I wonder who had the task of fitting out The Library with books.

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.

Stream of sentences: Gerald Murnane

In his introduction to the second edition of Tamarisk Row, Gerald Murnane sets to rights those readers who told him that the chapter 'The Gold Cup is run' is stream of consciousness. It is no such thing, he says.

What is now the last section of the book consists of five very long compound sentences, each comprising a main clause and numerous subordinate clauses, together with a description of part of a horse race.

He writes as a clockmaker, says J.M. Coetzee, a mapmaker, himself; he gives himself up to fiction. 

If you read Gerald Murnane at the right moment, his exactitude becomes dreamlike. There he is, giving himself up to a fiction of 1940s small town Australia, a boy age eight or ten, preoccupied by horse racing, racecourses, jockey colours, marbles, seeing up girls' pants behind tamarisk trees. 

The last time I read Gerald Murnane I was impatient with it. This time, more exténuée, I can keep restarting the race and the betting, Feel the flux of staying in one place. The depth charge. The adult writer reading and re-reading Proust.  

Proustian Australia is poignant. The broken pavé is a milkstone. Discuss. 

Gerald Murnane, William H. Gass

I began to get a heavy chilly feeling about a quarter of the way into Gerald Murnane's Tamarisk Row, and by the halfway point it was so bad I couldn't face these sentences: long, intricate, desolate, freezing at the height of summer.

This first novel from 1940s Australia is about horse-racing and boyhood, about racing marbles in the dust in place of horses, about a boy's preoccupation with catching a glimpse of girls' pants.

I read a lot of Patrick White in the seventies and eighties, and there's a chilly plainness in his novels too, as if this were the only way a sensitive Australian man could express the country he was born into, or out of.

Gerald Murnane writes sentences as vast and inhospitable as the land itself. The reining in of bleakness into sentences produces more bleakness.

J.M. Coetzee, who writes a puff on the back cover, is another chilly writer. Though I liked Foe, his reinvention of Daniel Defoe.

Just as I would not choose to read a novel that was in any way about football, I am dispirited by one which is about horse-racing.

By the end of the afternoon, a chance reference to William H. Gass in a review I read recently has sent me back to The Heart of the Heart of the Country.

A slow read of the long preface, lying in front of the fire on a sharp and windy afternoon, marking the most charming passages with a pencil, is what I need after Gerald Murnane.

Thus, obscurely and fortuitously, chance brought these stories forth from nowhere. Icicles once dripped solidly from my eaves, for instance. I thought them remarkable because they seemed to grow as a consequence of their own grief, and I wondered whether my feelings would freeze to me by the time they had traveled my length, and whether each of us wasn't just the size of our consciousness solidified;