John Maxwell Coetzee (born 9 February 1940) is an author and academic from South Africa.

He is now an Australian citizen and lives in South Australia. A novelist and literary critic as well as a translator, Coetzee has won the Booker Prize twice and was awarded the 2003 Nobel Prize in Literature.

Contents

1 Early life and education 2 Academic and literary career 3 Personality and reputation 4 Achievements and awards 5 Politics

o o o

5.1 Political orientation 5.2 Views on South Africa 5.3 Criticism of anti-terrorism laws

6 Bibliography o 6.1 Fiction o 6.2 Fictionalised autobiography / autofiction o 6.3 Non-fiction o 6.4 Translations and introductions o 6.5 Book reviews o 6.6 Film and TV adaptations 7 See also 8 References 9 External links

Early life and education

Coetzee was born in Cape Town, South Africa on 9 February 1940[2] to parents of Afrikaner descent.[3] His father was an occasional lawyer, government employee and sheep farmer, and his mother a schoolteacher.[4][5] The family spoke English at home, but Coetzee spoke Afrikaans with other relatives.[4] The family were descended from early Dutch settlers dating to the 17th century.[6] Coetzee also has Polish roots, as his great-grandfather Baltazar (or Balcer) Dubiel was a Polish immigrant to South Africa.[7] Coetzee spent most of his early life in Cape Town and in Worcester in Cape Province (modern-day Western Cape) as recounted in his fictionalized memoir, Boyhood (1997). The family moved to Worcester when Coetzee was eight after his father lost his government job due to disagreements over the state's apartheid policy.[5] Coetzee attended St. Joseph's College, a Catholic school in the Cape Town suburb of Rondebosch,[8] and later studied mathematics and English at the University of Cape Town, receiving his Bachelor of Arts with Honours in English in 1960 and his Bachelor of Arts with Honours in Mathematics in 1961.[9][10] Coetzee married Philippa Jubber in 1963[11] and divorced in 1980.[5] He had a daughter, Gisela (born 1968), and a son, Nicolas (born 1966), from the marriage.[11] Nicolas was killed in 1989 at the age of 23 in a car accident.[5][11][12][13]
[14]

Academic and literary career

Coetzee relocated to the United Kingdom in 1962, where he worked as a computer programmer, staying until 1965. [4] He initially worked for IBM in London before moving to International Computers Limited in Bracknell, Berkshire.[15] In 1963, while working in the UK, he was awarded a Master of Arts degree from the University of Cape Town for a dissertation on the novels of Ford Madox Ford.[4] His experiences in England were later recounted in Youth (2002), his second volume of fictionalized memoirs. Coetzee went to the University of Texas at Austin on the Fulbright Program in 1965. He received a PhD in linguistics there in 1969. His PhD thesis was on computer stylistic analysis of the works of Samuel Beckett.[4] In 1968, he began teaching English and literature at the State University of New York at Buffalo where he stayed until 1971.[4] It was at Buffalo that he started his first novel, Dusklands.[4] In 1971, Coetzee sought permanent residence in the United States, but it was denied due to his involvement in anti-Vietnam-War protests. In March 1970, Coetzee had been one of 45 faculty members who occupied the university's Hayes Hall and were subsequently arrested for criminal trespass.[16] He then returned to South Africa to teach English literature at the University of Cape Town. He was promoted to Professor of General Literature in 1983 and was Distinguished Professor of Literature between 1999 and 2001.[4] Upon retiring in 2002, Coetzee relocated to Adelaide, Australia, where he was made an honorary research fellow at the English Department of the University of Adelaide,[17] where his partner, Dorothy Driver,[10] is a fellow academic.[18] He served as professor on the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago until 2003.[19] In addition to his novels, he has published critical works and translations from Dutch and Afrikaans.[20] On 6 March 2006, Coetzee became an Australian citizen.[17]

Personality and reputation

Coetzee is known as reclusive and eschews publicity to such an extent that he did not collect either of his two Booker Prizes in person.[21][22] Author Rian Malan has said that:
Coetzee is a man of almost monkish self-discipline and dedication. He does not drink, smoke or eat meat. He cycles vast distances to keep fit and spends at least an hour at his writing-desk each morning, seven days a week. A colleague who has worked with him for more than a decade claims to have seen him laugh just once. An acquaintance has attended several dinner parties where Coetzee has uttered not a single word.[23]

As a result of his reclusive nature, signed copies of Coetzee's fiction are very highly sought after.[20] Recognising this, he was a key figure in the establishment of Oak Tree Press's First Chapter Series, a series of limited edition signed works by literary greats to raise money for the child victims and orphans of the African HIV/AIDS crisis.[24] In recent years, Coetzee has become a vocal critic of animal cruelty and advocate for the animal rights movement.[25] In a speech given on his behalf by Hugo Weaving in Sydney on 22 February 2007, Coetzee railed against the modern animal husbandry industry.[26] The speech was for Voiceless, an Australian non-profit animal rights organization.[27] Coetzee's fiction has similarly engaged with the problems of animal cruelty and animal welfare, in particular his novels Disgrace, The Lives of Animals and Elizabeth Costello. He is vegetarian.[28]

Achievements and awards

Coetzee has gained many awards throughout his career, although he has a reputation for avoiding award ceremonies.[29] His novel Waiting for the Barbarians was awarded the James Tait Black Memorial Prize and the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize,[30] and he is three-times winner of the CNA Prize.[31] Age of Iron was awarded the Sunday Express Book of the Year award,[32] and The Master of Petersburg was awarded the Irish Times International Fiction Prize in 1995.[33] He has also won the French Prix Femina tranger, the Commonwealth Writers' Prize, and the 1987 Jerusalem Prize for the Freedom of the Individual in Society.[30][32][34] He was the first author to be awarded the Booker Prize twice: first for Life & Times of Michael K in 1983, and again for Disgrace in 1999.[35] Only one author has matched this since Peter Carey, an Australian. Coetzee was named on the longlist for the 2009 prize for Summertime[36] and was an early favourite to win.[37][38] Coetzee subsequently made the shortlist, but lost out to bookmakers' favourite and eventual winner Hilary Mantel.[39] Coetzee was also longlisted in 2003 for Elizabeth Costello and in 2005 for Slow Man.[33] On 2 October 2003 it was announced that he was to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature, making him the fourth African writer to be so honoured,[40] and the second South African after Nadine Gordimer.[41] When awarding the prize, the Swedish Academy stated that Coetzee "in innumerable guises portrays the surprising involvement of the outsider".[42] The press release for the award also cited his "well-crafted composition, pregnant dialogue and analytical brilliance," while focusing on the moral nature of his work.[42] The prize ceremony was held in Stockholm on 10 December 2003.[41] Coetzee was awarded the Order of Mapungubwe (gold class) by the South African government on 27 September 2005 for his "exceptional contribution in the field of literature and for putting South Africa on the world stage."[43] He holds honorary doctorates from the University of Adelaide,[44] La Trobe University,[45] the University of Natal,[46] the University of Oxford,[47] Rhodes University,[48] the State University of New York at Buffalo,[32] the University of Strathclyde[32] and the University of Technology, Sydney.[49]

Politics
Political orientation
Writing about his past in the third person, Coetzee states in Doubling the Point that:
Politically, the raznochinets can go either way. But during his student years he, this person, this subject, my subject, steers clear of the right. As a child in Worcester he has seen enough of the Afrikaner right, enough of its rant, to last him a lifetime. In fact, even before Worcester he has perhaps seen more of cruelty and violence than should have been allowed to a child. So as a student he moves on the fringes of the left without being part of the left. Sympathetic to the human concerns of the left, he is alienated, when the crunch comes, by its language by all political language, in fact.[50]

Asked about the latter part of this quote in an interview, Coetzee said:
There is no longer a left worth speaking of, and a language of the left. The language of politics, with its new economistic bent, is even more repellent than it was fifteen years ago.[51]

Views on South Africa

Along with Andr Brink and Breyten Breytenbach, Coetzee was at "the forefront of the anti-apartheid movement within Afrikaner literature and letters".[52] On accepting the Jerusalem Prize in 1987, Coetzee spoke of the limitations of art in South African society, whose structures had resulted in "deformed and stunted relations between human beings" and "a deformed and stunted inner life". He went on to say that "South African literature is a literature in bondage. It is a less than fully human literature. It is exactly the kind of literature you would expect people to write from prison". He called on the South African government to abandon its apartheid policy.[34] Scholar Isidore Diala states that J. M. Coetzee, Nadine Gordimer and Andr Brink are "three of South Africa's most distinguished white writers, all with definite anti-apartheid commitment".[53] It has been argued that Coetzee's 1999 novel Disgrace allegorises South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission.[54] Asked about his views on the TRC, Coetzee has stated: "In a state with no official religion, the TRC was somewhat anomalous: a court of a certain kind based to a large degree on Christian teaching and on a strand of Christian teaching accepted in their hearts by only a tiny proportion of the citizenry. Only the future will tell what the TRC managed to achieve".[51]

Following his Australian citizenship ceremony, Coetzee said that "I did not so much leave South Africa, a country with which I retain strong emotional ties, but come to Australia. I came because from the time of my first visit in 1991, I was attracted by the free and generous spirit of the people, by the beauty of the land itself and when I first saw Adelaide by the grace of the city that I now have the honour of calling my home."[17] When he initially moved to Australia, he had cited the South African government's lax attitude to crime in that country as a reason for the move, leading to a spat with Thabo Mbeki, who, speaking of Coetzee's novel Disgrace stated that "South Africa is not only a place of rape".[21] In 1999, the African National Congress submission to an investigation into racism in the media by the South African Human Rights Commission named Disgrace as a novel exploiting racist stereotypes.[55] However, when Coetzee won his Nobel Prize, Mbeki congratulated him "on behalf of the South African nation and indeed the continent of Africa".[56]

Criticism of anti-terrorism laws

In 2005, Coetzee criticised contemporary anti-terrorism laws as resembling those employed by the apartheid regime in South Africa: "I used to think that the people who created [South Africa's] laws that effectively suspended the rule of law were moral barbarians. Now I know they were just pioneers ahead of their time".[57] The main character in Coetzee's 2007 Diary of a Bad Year, which has been described as blending "memoir with fiction, academic criticism with novelistic narration" and refusing "to recognize the border that has traditionally separated political theory from fictional narrative",[58] shares similar concerns about the policies of John Howard and George W. Bush.[59]

Bibliography
Fiction

Dusklands (1974) ISBN 0-14-024177-9

Dusklands (1974) is the first novel by J. M. Coetzee, winner of the 2003 Nobel Prize in Literature. It is a presentation and critique of the violence inherent in the colonialist and imperialist mentality of the Western world. The novel actually consists of two separate stories. The first one, "The Vietnam Project", relates the gradual descent into insanity of its protagonist Eugene Dawn. Eugene works for a U.S. government agency responsible for the psychological warfare in the Vietnam War. However, his work on mythography and psychological operations is taking a heavy toll on him; his fall culminates in him stabbing his own son, Martin. The second story, "The Narrative of Jacobus Coetzee", which takes place in the 18th century, is an account of a hunting expedition into the then "unexplored" interior of South Africa. After crossing the Orange River, Jacobus meets with a Namaqua tribe to trade, but suddenly falls ill. He is attended to by the tribe and gradually recovers, only to get into a fight for which he is expelled from the village. His last slave dying on the way home, he returns alone and later organizes a punitive expedition against the Namaqua. The narrative concludes with his execution of the slaves that deserted him on the previous journey and the massacre of the tribe.

In the Heart of the Country (1977) ISBN 0-14-006228-9

In the Heart of the Country (1977) is an English language novel by J. M. Coetzee which delves in the complex relationships that form between the colonizer and the colonized. It takes place on a desolate farm in South Africa told through the perspective of an intelligent yet meek European woman. She clashes with her father when he takes an African mistress, causing a rift that leads towards vengeance, violence and a muddling of her own relationship with the Africans. In the U.S.A. the book was published as From the Heart of the Country.[1] A motion picture adaptation, Dust, was directed by Marion Hnsel in 1985.[1]

Overview New York Times Review Cast, Credits & Awards Readers' Reviews

MOVIE REVIEW

Dust (1985) FILM: 'DUST,' COETZEE'S AFRICA

By JANET MASLIN - Published: October 31, 1986
J. M. COETZEE'S ''In the Heart of the Country'' (published here as ''From the Heart of the Country'') is written as a diary, in the fierce, scathing, half-mad voice of a woman living in near-isolation on a South African sheep farm. With its startling clarity and its paradoxically hallucinatory style, this brief 1977 novel would seem to be well out of any film maker's reach. But Marion Hansel, a Belgian director, has attempted to adapt it anyhow, and has done a job that is creditable if in some ways incomplete. The remote, barren setting for the story, on the veldt in Cape Province, has been hauntingly evoked (though the film was shot in Spain). And the characters, played by well-chosen, visually striking actors, are given life and stature. Miss Hansel's ''Dust,'' which opens today at Film Forum 2, has a handsome look that manages, in the manner of the great American westerns, to be both classical and wild. If it lacks the surprise and complexity of Mr. Coetzee's vision, and if its stillness sometimes borders on the becalmed, it nonetheless has a stark, streamlined manner and an underlying urgency. Though the film creates no visual equivalent for Mr. Coetzee's prose, it includes brief passages from the novel in a voice-over narrative from Magda, the embittered spinster played by Jane Birkin. Miss Birkin, who progresses from impassivity to pure hysteria during the course of the story, presents her haggard, beautiful features to the camera in a wholly unself-conscious way. Trevor Howard, who plays her father, must perform in an even more passive style, since his character has been given almost nothing to say. In the film's opening passages, Miss Hansel simply records the quiet monotony of their life together, observing their daily rituals and

the tattered gentility that seems so out of place in this deserted setting. These wordless scenes are slow and uncomplicated, but they do create a strong sense of deprivation. The film tells what may or may not have happened to Magda - it is never fully clear where reality leaves off and her imaginings begin after the arrival of two attractive young black servants, Hendrik (John Matshikiza) and his wife, Anna (Nadine Uwampa). The shy, lovely Anna is pursued tirelessly by Magda's father, who in earlier scenes with his daughter has seemed to have so little energy. Hendrik, meanwhile, becomes a fascinating and disturbing figure for his virginal employer, whom he half-tauntingly addresses as ''Miss.'' Though sexual longings become catalytic forces in this drama, they exist also as a way of expressing tensions between the black and white characters, and of undermining the feudal bonds that hold them together. In any case, the sexual possibilities introduced by Hendrik and Anna are enough to destroy Magda's tenuous self-control and send her frighteningly and irrevocably over the edge. These developments occur one at a time on screen, while on the page they seem to take place almost simultaneously, swimming in and out of narrative focus. The film is artful and intelligent, but it is left with a skeletal quality, ultimately separating the events of the story from the deep, tortured feelings that engender them. Hidden Currents

DUST,

direction and screenplay by Marion Hansel adapted from the novel ''In the Heart of the Country'' by J. M. Coetzee; cinematography by Walter Vanden Ende; edited by Susanna Rossberg; music by Martin St. Pierre; Running time: 87 minutes. Magda...Jane Birkin; The father...Trevor Howard; Hendrik...John Matshikiza; Klein Anna...Nadine Uwampa; Oud Anna...Lourdes Christina Sayo; Jacob...Rene Diaz.

Waiting for the Barbarians (1980) ISBN 0-14-006110-X

Coetzee took the title from the poem "Waiting for the Barbarians" by Greek-Egyptian poet Constantine P. Cavafy.[1][2] It may also be an allusion to Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot. Inspiration from Dino Buzzati's novel The Tartar Steppe is also evident, both for the title and the plot.

Plot summary
The story is set in small frontier town of a nameless empire. The town's magistrate is the story's protagonist and narrator. His rather peaceful existence on the frontier comes to an end with the arrival of some special forces of the Empire, led by a sinister Colonel Joll. There are rumours that the barbarians are preparing an attack on the Empire, and so Colonel Joll and his men conduct an expedition into the land beyond the frontier. They capture a number of "barbarians," bring them back to town, torture them, kill some of them, and leave for the capital in order to prepare a larger campaign against the barbarians. In the meantime, the Magistrate becomes involved with a "barbarian girl" who was left behind crippled and blinded by the torturers. Eventually, he decides to take her back to her people. After a life-threatening trip through the barren land he succeeds in his objective and returns to his town. Shortly thereafter, the Empire's forces return and the Magistrate's own plight begins.

Life & Times of Michael K (1983) ISBN 0-14-007448-1

Life & Times of Michael K is a 1983 novel by South African-born author J. M. Coetzee, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature for the year 2003. The book itself won the Booker Prize for 1983. The novel is a story of hare lipped, simple gardener Michael K, who makes an arduous journey from civil war-ridden urban South Africa to his mother's rural birthplace, during apartheid era, in the 197080s. The novel is split into three parts. The novel begins with Michael K, an institutionalized simpleton who works as a gardener in Cape Town, South Africa. Michael tends to his mother who works as a maid to a wealthy family. Eventually, the city breaks out in a massive warlike riot, and Michaels mother becomes very sick. Michael decides to quit his job and escape the city to return his mother to her birthplace of Prince Albert . Michael finds himself unable to obtain the proper permits for travel out of the city so he builds a shoddy rickshaw to carry his mother, and they go on their way. Soon after escaping, Michaels mother dies in a hospital. He lingers for some time, carrying his mothers ashes around with him in a box. Finally, Michael decides to continue on his journey to Prince Albert to deliver his mothers ashes. Along the way, though, he is detained for not having the required travel papers, thus being assigned to work detail on a railway track. After his job on the railway track is finished, Michael makes his way to the farm his mother spoke of on Prince Albert. The farm is abandoned and desolate. Soon, Michael discovers how to live off the land. However, when one of the relatives of the real owners of the farm arrives, he treats Michael like a servant. Michael dislikes this treatment so he escapes up into the mountains. In the mountains, Michael goes through a period of starvation while he becomes aware of his surroundings. In his malnourished state he finds his way down to a town where he is picked up by the police and is sent to work on a work camp. Here, Michael meets a man named Robert. Robert explains that the workers in the camp are exploited for cheap labor by the townspeople. Eventually, there is an attack on Prince Albert and the workers of the camp are blamed. The local police captain takes over and Michael escapes. Michael finds his way back to the farm but soon feels claustrophobic within the house. Therefore, he builds a shelter in the open where he is able to watch his garden. Rebels come out of the mountains and use his garden. Although Michael is angered by this he stays in hiding. Michael becomes malnourished and delirious again because he has not come out of hiding. He is found by some soldiers and is taken to a rehabilitation camp in Cape Town. At the rehabilitation camp, a doctor becomes interested in Michael. He finds Michaels simple nature extremely fascinating and finds him to be unfairly accused of aiding rebels. Michael becomes very sick and delirious because he refuses to eat. The doctor tries to understand Michaels stubborn ways while attempting to get Michael released. However, Michael escapes on his own. Upon his escape, Michael meets with a group of nomadic people who feed him and introduce him to a woman who has sex with him; later we see him attracted to women for the first time. He returns to the apartment where he and his mother lived in Cape Town, the same apartment and city he had tried to escape some time ago. Michael reflects on the garden he made in Prince Albert.

Some commentators notice a connection between the character Michael K and the protagonist Josef K. in The Trial by Franz Kafka. The book also bears many references to Kafka, and it is believed, "K" is a tribute to Kafka.

Major Character Analysis Michael K (K)

A simple man born in South Africa, K bears the deformity of a hare lip. Ks central role is underscored by his appearancehe is deformed and because of this, people look down upon him. His mother, the police, and Visagies grandson all treat him with respect of a lesser human on the basis that he looks and acts slow. This is shown by the fact that Ks mother institutionalizes him until she needs him, the police let him wander around unnoticed because he has a childish innocence, and Visagies grandson treats him as a common servant. But K is also dedicated to being true to his beliefs. When Ks mother becomes very ill, he dedicates his life to taking her home at whatever the cost. And when she dies along the way, K continues to show his dedication by carrying her ashes all the way to Prince Albert so she can finally be home. When K is institutionalized he becomes a gardener, where he learns to enjoy isolation and the freedom it grants him. We see Ks isolation and freedom continue throughout the book, starting at the Visagies house where he first begins to learn to live off the land. But when his freedom is encroached on, this makes K flee even further from society towards the freewill and seclusion he seeks. In the mountains is able to understand how he wants to live his life, which involves only eating food he has grown from the Earth. With Ks return to Cape Town, he returns to his mothers old apartment and ends with his thoughts of farming and longing for freedom.

Anna K
Michael Ks mother has disliked him since she saw his disfigurement. Anna put K into a government institution and ignored him until she had no one else to turn to because of her health. She is a very cruel mother, but K shows his unconditional love for her by taking care of her until her death. Anna lived her life in fear: fear of losing her job, getting sick, or being put out on the street. Her uncaring nature toward a son she does not love blinds her to the sacrifice K makes to accomplish her dream of returning to Prince Albert.

The Doctor
The infirmary doctor at the rehabilitation camp is responsible for taking care of K when he is brought in. The doctor was the only one of the staff at the hospital to realize K is an innocent civilian, being unfairly treated for being in the wrong place at the wrong time. The doctor becomes obsessed with K and his childish nature and his reasons for not eating. The doctor originally thinks K wants to kill himselfhence his reason for not eatingbut he comes to understand that K does want to live, just on his own terms. After Ks escape, the doctor realizes that because the camp is becoming under more strict military control, he is envious of Ks freedom. K changes the doctors outlook on life: the doctor fantasizes about following K and begging K to let him live like him.

Themes
Value of Human Life
Michael K is often seen as a parasite, or unskilled worker throughout this book. He doesnt have a very high social status and he is aware of that. At times he purposely acts dumb, like not speaking, because he knows he can get away with it. However, Michael knows that he still has a purpose in this world but it takes him the whole book to discover what that purpose is. He spends his time living off the land one day at a time. He doesn't realize until later that he was born to be a gardener. The goal of his journey is not to find his purpose but to assist his mother and fulfill her wishes, what he believed to be his original purpose in life. Michael happens to stumble upon his gardening skills by doing what he had to for survival. He loves his life as a gardener and realizes that most other people wouldnt be able to survive as he did. There are times where he questions his love for gardening when others tell him that he should be a fencer, just as everyone questions if theyre making the right choice. He believes that,"A man must live so that he leaves no trace of his living." Becoming a gardener is Michaels best bet for living out his philosophy.

Time
In the conclusion, Michael states that the moral of his story is that there is enough time for everything. The concept of time is present throughout the whole novel. Michael K goes on his life journey being grateful for each day. This idea is represented in the metaphor used in the last paragraph of the book. [H]e would lower [the spoon] down the shaft deep into the earth, and when he brought it up there would be water in the bowl of the spoon; and in that way, he would say, one can live. He is alluding to the idea of taking one step (sip) at a time and enjoying each day fully. He seems to have time for everything, though ironically, he doesnt take the time to do much other than garden or help his mother. That is his choice, however. This ties into the idea that everyone has choices in life, and if they were to choose to, they would have time for everything.

World Order
The novel takes place in South Africa during a civil war in the 1970-80s. Often times throughout Ks journey, he is stopped by officers who threaten to shoot him or who take his belongings. Also, more than once he is taken into a camp that vaguely resembles a concentration camp. There, they are given food but K denies it. He grows weaker and weaker until he finally escapes. Later on he is taken to a hospital instead because he is too weak to work. There he refuses food as well. This refusal of food represents Ks opposition to the war and to higher order. He doesnt like taking direction from anyone and feels that the war doesn't have much affect on his life, just an event that is getting in the way of how he wants to live.

Foe (1986) ISBN 0-14-009623-X

Foe is a 1986 novel by expatriate South African author J. M. Coetzee. Woven around the existing plot of Robinson Crusoe, Foe is written from the perspective of Susan Barton, a castaway who landed on the same island inhabited by "Cruso" and Friday as their adventures were already underway. Like Robinson Crusoe, it is a frame story, unfolded as Barton's narrative while in England attempting to convince the writer Daniel Foe to help transform her tale into popular fiction. Focused primarily on themes of language and power, the novel was the subject of criticism in South Africa, where it was regarded as politically irrelevant on its release. Coetzee revisited the composition of Robinson Crusoe in 2003 in his Nobel prize acceptance speech.

Plot

Susan Barton is on a quest to find her kidnapped daughter, her namesake, whom she knows has been taken to the New World. She is set adrift during a mutiny on a ship to Lisbon. When she comes ashore, she finds Friday and a Cruso who has grown complacent, content to forget his past and live his life on the island with Fridaytongueless by what Cruso claims to have been the act of former slave ownersin attendance. Arriving near the end of their residence, Barton is only on the island for a year before the trio is rescued, but the homesick Cruso does not survive the voyage to England. In England with Friday, Barton attempts to set her adventures on the island to paper, but she feels her efforts lack popular appeal. She tries to convince novelist Daniel Foe to help with her manuscript, but he does not agree on which of her adventures is interesting. Foe would prefer to write about her time in Bahia looking for her daughter, and when he does write on the story she wishes, fabulates about Cruso's adventures rather than relating her facts. Frustrating Barton's efforts further, Foe, who becomes her lover, is preoccupied with debt and has little time or energy to write about anything. Barton's story takes a twist with the return of someone claiming to be her missing daughter.

Themes
Analysts of the book have primarily focused on themes of power and language use, particularly as relates to marginalized people. In 1994 Patrick McGrath of the The New York Times claimed that one of Coetzee's central themes throughout his body of work is the "linkage of language and power, the idea that those without voices cease to signify, figuratively and literally"; McGrath pointed to Foe as the "most explicit expression" of that theme.[1] Barton longs to tell her own story, but lacks the language to do so in a way that the public will accept. The agent she chooses to help give her the words necessary to communicate persists in erasing her history, by minimizing what she perceives as important and supplanting her remembered facts with adventurous fiction. As Foe takes over her tale, McGrath said, Barton "loses her voice in history, and thus her identity."[1] In addition to trying to preserve herself and her history, Barton is attempting to give voice to the even more graphically silenced Friday. Denis Donoghue of New York University, who drew attention to the implication that Friday's tongue may have been removed by Cruso himself, stated that "the political parable [of the novel] issues from Friday's tonguelessness", as one of the central themes of the novel is the imperative to give voice to the oppressed.[2] Barton sees Friday as caught on the edge of birth by his speechlessness, though she believes that his desire for liberation is explicit, if unspoken; Foe though wondering if those who are not speechless "are secretly grateful" for the opportunity to project their thoughts onto Friday believes that Friday could overcome his speechlessness by learning to write.[2] While the book depicts the struggle to control text, Donoghue concludes that the undefined narrator of the book's finale (which Sam Durrant in "J. M. Coetzee, Elizabeth Costello and the Limits of the Sympathetic Imagination" pointed out could only have been written after the deaths of Barton and Defoe)[3] is "the voice of the poetic imagination, its sympathies expanding beyond all systems to reach the defeated, the silenced"[2] Friday is afforded a final opportunity to tell his story, but can only communicate through the release of bubbles from his waterlogged corpse, a communication which neither the narrator nor the reader can interpret. David Attwell in J.M. Coetzee: South Africa and the Politics of Writing saw this inability of a silenced black character to communicate as central to the book, indicating that "Friday's enforced silence represents what a monocultural, metropolitan discourse cannot hear". [4] South African writer Rian Malan also felt the racial gap was key, describing Foe as "the most profound book ever written about race relations in a society where whites were often separated from blacks by an abyss of linguistic and cultural incomprehension."[5] When Malan interviewed Coetzee for Time Magazine, he questioned the writer about this theme, who only replied, "I would not wish to deny you your reading."[5] Professor Manju Jaidka of Panjab University, Chandigarh noted that Barton, as a woman in a very masculine text, in herself represents "the minority, the marginalised, or the silenced other."[6] Jane Poyner in J.M. Coetzee and the Idea of the Public Intellectual highlighted the inherent tension in Barton's role, as she simultaneously struggles against the efforts of Foe to appropriate and misrepresent her story and unintentionally "'colonizes' Friday's story" herself as she interprets his silence.[7]

Critical reception
Foe attracted criticism in South Africa upon its publication. According to Michael Marais in "Death and the Space of the Response of the Other in J.M. Coetzee's The Master of Petersburg", Foe met "acrimony, even dismay" at the time of its publication, as one of South Africa's "most prominent authors" seemed to turn his attention from compelling events in South Africa to "writing about the writing of a somewhat pedestrian eighteenth century novelist."[8] In detailing that receipt, Marais quotes Michael Chapman in "Writing of Politics" as typical with his dismissive comment: "In our knowledge of the human suffering on our own doorstep of thousands of detainees who are denied recourse to the rule of law, Foe does not so much speak to Africa as provide a kind of masturbatory release, in this country, for the Europeanising dreams of an intellectual coterie."[9] Attwell, however, noted in 2003 that the novel is contextualized to Africa by the transformation of Friday from a Carib who looked nearly European to an African.[10] In the United States, reception was less politically charged. The novel received a positive review in The New York Times, where Michiko Kakutani praised the writing as "lucid and precise; the landscape depicted, mythic yet specific", concluding that "the novel which remains somewhat solipsistically concerned with literature and its consequences - lacks the fierceness and moral resonance of [Waiting for the Barbarians] and [Life and Times of Michael K], and yet it stands, nonetheless, as a finely honed testament to its author's intelligence, imagination and skill."[11] Andrew O'Hehir for Salon described the novel as "a bit dry."[12] In his review for Time Magazine, Stefan Kanfer questions the impact of what he describes as an "achingly symbolic retelling", suggesting that readers may be more self-congratulatory for discovering the author's "brilliantly disguised" themes than moved by "urgencies that are neither fresh nor illumined."[13]

Nobel acceptance speech

In 2003, when Coetzee was awarded a Nobel prize in literature, he revisited the theme of composition as self-definition in his acceptance speech, entitled "He and his Man".[14] Coetzee, who had lectured in character before, narrated a situation in which an elderly Crusoe quietly living in Bristol becomes the ambivalent muse of Defoe. According to The Guardian, this act of composition "write[s] "Defoe into existence, rather than the other way around."[14] Although Crusoe is the narrator of the piece, Coetzee indicated he did not know whether Crusoe or Defoe represented him in the lecture.[14] By contrast, he clearly identified himself with Barton in Foe: "the unsuccessful authorworse authoress."[15]

Notes

1. 2.

^ a b McGrath, Patrick (November 20, 1994). "To Be Conscious Is to Suffer". New York Times. http://www.nytimes.com/books/97/11/02/home/coetzee-master.html. Retrieved 2009-01-29. ^ a b c Donoghue, Denis (February 22, 1987). "Her man Friday". The New York Times: p. Section 7; Page 1; Column 1. http://www.nytimes.com/books/97/11/02/home/coetzee-foe.html. Retrieved 2009-01-28.

3. 4. 5. 6. 7.

^ Durrant, Sam (2006). "J.M. Coetzee, Elizabeth Costello and the Limits of the Sympathetic Imagination". in Poyner, Jane. J.M. Coetzee and the Idea of the Public Intellectual. Ohio University Press. p. 122. ISBN 0821416863. http://books.google.com/books?id=BalLL9BL4acC&pg=PA122&dq=Foe+Coetzee#PPA122,M1.. ^ Atwell, 5 ^ a b Malan, Rian (October 5, 2006). "Only the Big Questions". Time Magazine. http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,493312-1,00.html. Retrieved 2009-01-28. ^ Jaidka, Manju (June 9, 2002). "South Africa's voice of the people". The Tribune. http://www.tribuneindia.com/2002/20020609/spectrum/book6.htm. Retrieved 2009-01-28. ^ Poyner, Jane (2006). "Introduction". in Poyner, Jane. J.M. Coetzee and the Idea of the Public Intellectual. Ohio University Press. p. 15. ISBN 0821416863. http://books.google.com/books? id=BalLL9BL4acC&pg=PA122&dq=Foe+Coetzee#PPA15,M1. "In Foe (1986) Susan Barton resists the patriarchal attempts of the author-figure Foe to misrepresent the story of her shipwreck on a Robinsonian island while simultaneously Barton inadvertently "colonizes" Friday's story"

8. ^ Marais, 83 9. ^ 335, quoted in Marais, 84. 10. ^ Atwell, 108. 11. ^ Kakutani, Michiko (February 11, 1987). "Books of the times: FOE. By J. M. Coetzee. 157 pages. Viking. $15.95.". The
New York Times. http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html? res=9B0DE3DB1331F932A25751C0A961948260&sec=&spon=&pagewanted=all. Retrieved 2009-01-28.

12. ^ O'Hehir, Andrew (October 3 2003). "The outsider: J.M. Coetzee is a teller of mysterious and universal tales in the
tradition of Kafka". http://dir.salon.com/story/books/feature/2003/10/03/coetzee/index.html. Retrieved 2009-01-28.

13. ^ Kanfer, Stefan (23 March 1987). "Friday Night FOE". Time Magazine.
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,963826,00.html. Retrieved 2009-01-28.

14. ^

a b c Staff and agencies (9 December 2003). "Coetzee takes on Crusoe for Nobel". Guardian. http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2003/dec/09/nobelprize.awardsandprizes. Retrieved 2009-01-28.

15. ^ Atwell, 112.

Sources

Attwell, David (1993). J.M. Coetzee: South Africa and the Politics of Writing. University of California Press. ISBN 0520078128. Marais, Michael (2006). "Death and the Space of the Response of the Other in J.M. Coetzee's The Master of St. Petersburg". in Poyner, Jane. J.M. Coetzee and the Idea of the Public Intellectual. Ohio University Press. pp. 8399. ISBN 0821416863. "He and his Man", transcript. The Guardian

Further reading

He and his man

But to return to my new companion. I was greatly delighted with him, and made it my business to teach him everything that was proper to make him useful, handy, and helpful; but especially to make him speak, and understand me when I spoke; and he was the aptest scholar there ever was. Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe Boston, on the coast of Lincolnshire, is a handsome town, writes his man. The tallest church steeple in all of England is to be found there; sea-pilots use it to navigate by. Around Boston is fen country. Bitterns abound, ominous birds who give a heavy, groaning call loud enough to be heard two miles away, like the report of a gun. The fens are home to many other kinds of birds too, writes his man, duck and mallard, teal and widgeon, to capture which the men of the fens, the fen-men, raise tame ducks, which they call decoy ducks or duckoys. Fens are tracts of wetland. There are tracts of wetland all over Europe, all over the world, but they are not named fens, fen is an English word, it will not migrate. These Lincolnshire duckoys, writes his man, are bred up in decoy ponds, and kept tame by being fed by hand. Then when the season comes they are sent abroad to Holland and Germany. In Holland and Germany they meet with others of their kind, and, seeing how miserably these Dutch and German ducks live, how their rivers freeze in winter and their lands are covered in snow, fail not to let them know, in a form of language which they make them understand, that in England from where they come the case is quite otherwise: English ducks have sea shores full of nourishing food, tides that flow freely up the creeks; they have lakes, springs, open ponds and sheltered ponds; also lands full of corn left behind by the gleaners; and no frost or snow, or very light. By these representations, he writes, which are made all in duck language, they, the decoy ducks or duckoys, draw together vast numbers of fowl and, so to say, kidnap them. They guide them back across the seas from Holland and Germany and settle them down in their decoy ponds on the fens of Lincolnshire, chattering and gabbling to them all the time in their own language, telling them these are the ponds they told them of, where they shall live safely and securely. And while they are so occupied the decoy-men, the masters of the decoy-ducks, creep into covers or coverts they have built of reeds upon the fens, and all unseen toss handfuls of corn upon the water; and the decoy ducks or duckoys follow them, bringing their foreign guests behind. And so over two or three days they lead their guests up narrower and narrower waterways, calling to them all the time to see how well we live in England, to a place where nets have been spanned. Then the decoy-men send out their decoy dog, which has been perfectly trained to swim after fowl, barking as he swims. Being alarmed to the last degree by this terrible creature, the ducks take to the wing, but are forced down again into the water by the arched nets above, and so must swim or perish, under the net. But the net grows narrower and narrower, like a purse, and at the end stand the decoy men, who take their captives out one by one. The decoy ducks are stroked and made much of, but as for their guests, these are clubbed on the spot and plucked and sold by the hundred and by the thousand.

All of this news of Lincolnshire his man writes in a neat, quick hand, with quills that he sharpens with his little pen-knife each day before a new bout with the page. In Halifax, writes his man, there stood, until it was removed in the reign of King James the First, an engine of execution, which worked thus. The condemned man was laid with his head on the cross-base or cup of the scaffold; then the executioner knocked out a pin which held up the heavy blade. The blade descended down a frame as tall as a church door and beheaded the man as clean as a butcher's knife. Custom had it in Halifax, though, that if between the knocking out of the pin and the descent of the blade the condemned man could leap to his feet, run down the hill, and swim across the river without being seized again by the executioner, he would be let free. But in all the years the engine stood in Halifax this never happened. He (not his man now but he) sits in his room by the waterside in Bristol and reads this. He is getting on in years, almost it might be said he is an old man by now. The skin of his face, that had been almost blackened by the tropic sun before he made a parasol out of palm or palmetto leaves to shade himself, is paler now, but still leathery like parchment; on his nose is a sore from the sun that will not heal. The parasol he has still with him in his room, standing in a corner, but the parrot that came back with him has passed away. Poor Robin! the parrot would squawk from its perch on his shoulder, Poor Robin Crusoe! Who shall save poor Robin? His wife could not abide the lamenting of the parrot, Poor Robin day in, day out. I shall wring its neck, said she, but she had not the courage to do so. When he came back to England from his island with his parrot and his parasol and his chest full of treasure, he lived for a while tranquilly enough with his old wife on the estate he bought in Huntingdon, for he had become a wealthy man, and wealthier still after the printing of the book of his adventures. But the years in the island, and then the years traveling with his serving-man Friday (poor Friday, he laments to himself, squawk-squawk, for the parrot would never speak Friday's name, only his), had made the life of a landed gentleman dull for him. And, if the truth be told, married life was a sore disappointment too. He found himself retreating more and more to the stables, to his horses, which blessedly did not chatter, but whinnied softly when he came, to show that they knew who he was, and then held their peace. It seemed to him, coming from his island, where until Friday arrived he lived a silent life, that there was too much speech in the world. In bed beside his wife he felt as if a shower of pebbles were being poured upon his head, in an unending rustle and clatter, when all he desired was to sleep. So when his old wife gave up the ghost he mourned but was not sorry. He buried her and after a decent while took this room in The Jolly Tar on the Bristol waterfront, leaving the direction of the estate in Huntingdon to his son, bringing with him only the parasol from the island that made him famous and the dead parrot fixed to its perch and a few necessaries, and has lived here alone ever since, strolling by day about the wharves and quays, staring out west over the sea, for his sight is still keen, smoking his pipes. As to his meals, he has these brought up to his room; for he finds no joy in society, having grown used to solitude on the island. He does not read, he has lost the taste for it; but the writing of his adventures has put him in the habit of writing, it is a pleasant enough recreation. In the evening by candlelight he will take out his papers and sharpen his quills and write a page or two of his man, the man who sends report of the duckoys of Lincolnshire, and of the great engine of death in Halifax, that one can escape if before the awful blade can descend one can leap to one's feet and dash down the hill, and of numbers of other things. Every place he goes he sends report of, that is his first business, this busy man of his. Strolling along the harbour wall, reflecting upon the engine from Halifax, he, Robin, whom the parrot used to call poor Robin, drops a pebble and listens. A second, less than a second, before it strikes the water. God's grace is swift, but might not the great blade of tempered steel, being heavier than a pebble and being greased with tallow, be swifter? How will we ever escape it? And what species of man can it be who will dash so busily hither and thither across the kingdom, from one spectacle of death to another (clubbings, beheadings), sending in report after report? A man of business, he thinks to himself. Let him be a man of business, a grain merchant or a leather merchant, let us say; or a manufacturer and purveyor of roof tiles somewhere where clay is plentiful, Wapping let us say, who must travel much in the interest of his trade. Make him prosperous, give him a wife who loves him and does not chatter too much and bears him children, daughters mainly; give him a reasonable happiness; then bring his happiness suddenly to an end. The Thames rises one winter, the kilns in which the tiles are baked are washed away, or the grain stores, or the leather works; he is ruined, this man of his, debtors descend upon him like flies or like crows, he has to flee his home, his wife, his children, and seek hiding in the most wretched of quarters in Beggars Lane under a false name and in disguise. And all of this - the wave of water, the ruin, the flight, the pennilessness, the tatters, the solitude - let all of this be a figure of the shipwreck and the island where he, poor Robin, was secluded from the world for twenty-six years, till he almost went mad (and indeed, who is to say he did not, in some measure?). Or else let the man be a saddler with a home and a shop and a warehouse in Whitechapel and a mole on his chin and a wife who loves him and does not chatter and bears him children, daughters mainly, and gives him much happiness, until the plague descends upon the city, it is the year 1665, the great fire of London has not yet come. The plague descends upon London: daily, parish by parish, the count of the dead mounts, rich and poor, for the plague makes no distinction among stations, all this saddler's worldly wealth will not save him. He sends his wife and daughters into the countryside and makes plans to flee himself, but then does not. Thou shalt not be afraid for the terror at night, he reads, opening the Bible at hazard, not for the arrow that flieth by day; not for the pestilence that walketh in darkness; nor for the destruction that wasteth at noon-day. A thousand shall fall at thy side, and ten thousand at thy right hand, but it shall not come nigh thee. Taking heart from this sign, a sign of safe passage, he remains in afflicted London and sets about writing reports. I came upon a crowd in the street, he writes, and a woman in their midst pointing to the heavens. See, she cries, an angel in white brandishing a flaming sword! And the crowd all nod among themselves, Indeed it is so, they say: an angel with a sword! But he, the saddler, can see no angel, no sword. All he can see is a strange-shaped cloud brighter on the one side than the other, from the shining of the sun. It is an allegory! cries the woman in the street; but he can see no allegory for the life of him. Thus in his report. On another day, walking by the riverside in Wapping, his man that used to be a saddler but now has no occupation observes how a woman from the door of her house calls out to a man rowing in a dory: Robert! Robert! she calls; and how the man then rows ashore, and from the dory takes up a sack which he lays upon a stone by the riverside, and rows away again; and how the woman comes down to the riverside and picks up the sack and bears it home, very sorrowful-looking. He accosts the man Robert and speaks to him. Robert informs him that the woman is his wife and the sack holds a week's supplies for her and their children, meat and meal and butter; but that he dare not approach nearer, for all of them, wife and children, have the plague upon them; and that it breaks his heart. And all of this - the man Robert and wife keeping communion through calls across the water, the sack left by the waterside - stands for itself certainly, but stands also as a figure of his, Robinson's, solitude on his island, where in his hour of darkest despair he called out across the waves to his loved ones in England to save him, and at other times swam out to the wreck in search of supplies. Further report from that time of woe. Able no longer to bear the pain from the swellings in the groin and armpit that are the signs of the plague, a man runs out howling, stark naked, into the street, into Harrow Alley in Whitechapel, where his man the saddler witnesses him as he leaps and prances and makes a thousand strange gestures, his wife and children running after him crying out,

calling to him to come back. And this leaping and prancing is allegoric of his own leaping and prancing when, after the calamity of the shipwreck and after he had scoured the strand for sign of his shipboard companions and found none, save a pair of shoes that were not mates, he had understood he was cast up all alone on a savage island, likely to perish and with no hope of salvation. (But of what else does he secretly sing, he wonders to himself, this poor afflicted man of whom he reads, besides his desolation? What is he calling, across the waters and across the years, out of his private fire?) A year ago he, Robinson, paid two guineas to a sailor for a parrot the sailor had brought back from, he said, Brazil - a bird not so magnificent as his own well-beloved creature but splendid nonetheless, with green feathers and a scarlet crest and a great talker too, if the sailor was to be believed. And indeed the bird would sit on its perch in his room in the inn, with a little chain on its leg in case it should try to fly away, and say the words Poor Poll! Poor Poll! over and over till he was forced to hood it; but could not be taught to say any other word, Poor Robin! for instance, being perhaps too old for that. Poor Poll, gazing out through the narrow window over the mast-tops and, beyond the mast-tops, over the grey Atlantic swell: What island is this, asks Poor Poll, that I am cast up on, so cold, so dreary? Where were you, my Saviour, in my hour of great need? A man, being drunk and it being late at night (another of his man's reports), falls asleep in a doorway in Cripplegate. The dead-cart comes on its way (we are still in the year of the plague), and the neighbours, thinking the man dead, place him on the dead-cart among the corpses. By and by the cart comes to the dead pit at Mountmill and the carter, his face all muffled against the effluvium, lays hold of him to throw him in; and he wakes up and struggles in his bewilderment. Where am I? he says. You are about to be buried among the dead, says the carter. But am I dead then? says the man. And this too is a figure of him on his island. Some London-folk continue to go about their business, thinking they are healthy and will be passed over. But secretly they have the plague in their blood: when the infection reaches their heart they fall dead upon the spot, so reports his man, as if struck by lightning. And this is a figure for life itself, the whole of life. Due preparation. We should make due preparation for death, or else be struck down where we stand. As he, Robinson, was made to see when of a sudden, on his island, he came one day upon the footprint of a man in the sand. It was a print, and therefore a sign: of a foot, of a man. But it was a sign of much else too. You are not alone, said the sign; and also, No matter how far you sail, no matter where you hide, you will be searched out. In the year of the plague, writes his man, others, out of terror, abandoned all, their homes, their wives and children, and fled as far from London as they could. When the plague had passed, their flight was condemned as cowardice on all sides. But, writes his man, we forget what kind of courage was called on to confront the plague. It was not a mere soldier's courage, like gripping a weapon and charging the foe: it was like charging Death itself on his pale horse. Even at his best, his island parrot, the better loved of the two, spoke no word he was not taught to speak by his master. How then has it come about that this man of his, who is a kind of parrot and not much loved, writes as well as or better than his master? For he wields an able pen, this man of his, no doubt of that. Like charging Death himself on his pale horse. His own skill, learned in the counting house, was in making tallies and accounts, not in turning phrases. Death himself on his pale horse: those are words he would not think of. Only when he yields himself up to this man of his do such words come. And decoy ducks, or duckoys: What did he, Robinson, know of decoy ducks? Nothing at all, until this man of his began sending in reports. The duckoys of the Lincolnshire fens, the great engine of execution in Halifax: reports from a great tour this man of his seems to be making of the island of Britain, which is a figure of the tour he made of his own island in the skiff he built, the tour that showed there was a farther side to the island, craggy and dark and inhospitable, which he ever afterwards avoided, though if in the future colonists shall arrive upon the island they will perhaps explore it and settle it; that too being a figure, of the dark side of the soul and the light. When the first bands of plagiarists and imitators descended upon his island history and foisted on the public their own feigned stories of the castaway life, they seemed to him no more or less than a horde of cannibals falling upon his own flesh, that is to say, his life; and he did not scruple to say so. When I defended myself against the cannibals, who sought to strike me down and roast me and devour me, he wrote, I thought I defended myself against the thing itself. Little did I guess, he wrote, that these cannibals were but figures of a more devilish voracity, that would gnaw at the very substance of truth. But now, reflecting further, there begins to creep into his breast a touch of fellow-feeling for his imitators. For it seems to him now that there are but a handful of stories in the world; and if the young are to be forbidden to prey upon the old then they must sit for ever in silence. Thus in the narrative of his island adventures he tells of how he awoke in terror one night convinced the devil lay upon him in his bed in the shape of a huge dog. So he leapt to his feet and grasped a cutlass and slashed left and right to defend himself while the poor parrot that slept by his bedside shrieked in alarm. Only many days later did he understand that neither dog nor devil had lain upon him, but rather that he had suffered a palsy of a passing kind, and being unable to move his leg had concluded there was some creature stretched out upon it. Of which event the lesson would seem to be that all afflictions, including the palsy, come from the devil and are the very devil; that a visitation by illness may be figured as a visitation by the devil, or by a dog figuring the devil, and vice versa, the visitation figured as an illness, as in the saddler's history of the plague; and therefore that no one who writes stories of either, the devil or the plague, should forthwith be dismissed as a forger or a thief. When, years ago, he resolved to set down on paper the story of his island, he found that the words would not come, the pen would not flow, his very fingers were stiff and reluctant. But day by day, step by step, he mastered the writing business, until by the time of his adventures with Friday in the frozen north the pages were rolling off easily, even thoughtlessly. That old ease of composition has, alas, deserted him. When he seats himself at the little writing-desk before the window looking over Bristol harbour, his hand feels as clumsy and the pen as foreign an instrument as ever before. Does he, the other one, that man of his, find the writing business easier? The stories he writes of ducks and machines of death and London under the plague flow prettily enough; but then so did his own stories once. Perhaps he misjudges him, that dapper little man with the quick step and the mole upon his chin. Perhaps at this very moment he sits alone in a hired room somewhere in this wide kingdom dipping the pen and dipping it again, full of doubts and hesitations and second thoughts. How are they to be figured, this man and he? As master and slave? As brothers, twin brothers? As comrades in arms? Or as enemies, foes? What name shall he give this nameless fellow with whom he shares his evenings and sometimes his nights too, who is absent only in the daytime, when he, Robin, walks the quays inspecting the new arrivals and his man gallops about the kingdom making his inspections? Will this man, in the course of his travels, ever come to Bristol? He yearns to meet the fellow in the flesh, shake his hand, take a stroll with him along the quayside and hearken as he tells of his visit to the dark north of the island, or of his adventures in the writing business. But he fears there will be no meeting, not in this life. If he must settle on a likeness for the pair of them, his man and he, he would write that they are like two ships sailing in contrary directions, one west, the other east. Or better, that they are deckhands toiling in the rigging, the one on a ship sailing west, the other on a ship sailing east. Their ships pass close, close enough to hail. But the seas are rough, the weather is stormy: their eyes lashed by the spray, their hands burned by the cordage, they pass each other by, too busy even to wave. THE NOBEL FOUNDATION 2003

The castaway: DJ Taylor on JM Coetzee's intriguing Nobel acceptance speech, The Guardian

Age of Iron (1990) ISBN 0-14-027565-7 The Master of Petersburg (1994) ISBN 0-14-023810-7 The Lives of Animals (1999) ISBN 0-691-07089-X Disgrace (1999) ISBN 0-09-928952-0 Elizabeth Costello (2003) ISBN 0-670-03130-5 Slow Man (2005) ISBN 0-670-03459-2 Diary of a Bad Year (2007) ISBN 1-846-55120-X

Fictionalised autobiography / autofiction

Boyhood: Scenes from Provincial Life (1997) ISBN 0-14-026566-X Youth: Scenes from Provincial Life II (2002) ISBN 0-670-03102-X Summertime (2009) ISBN 1-846-55318-0 White Writing: On the Culture of Letters in South Africa (1988) ISBN 0-300-03974-3 Doubling the Point: Essays and Interviews (1992) ISBN 0-674-21518-4 Giving Offense: Essays on Censorship (1996), University of Chicago Press [hence, US spelling "offense"] ISBN 0-22611176-8 Stranger Shores: Literary Essays, 19861999 (2002) ISBN 0-142-00137-6 Inner Workings: Literary Essays, 20002005 (2007) ISBN 0-099-50614-9 A Posthumous Confession by Marcellus Emants (Boston: Twayne, 1976 & London: Quartet, 1986) Translated by J. M. Coetzee. The Expedition to the Boabab Tree by Wilma Stockenstrm (Johannesburg: Jonathan Ball, 1983 & London: Faber, 1984) Translated by J. M. Coetzee. Landscape with Rowers: Poetry from the Netherlands Translated and Introduced by J. M. Coetzee (2004) ISBN 0-69112385-3 Introduction to Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe (Oxford World's Classics) ISBN 0-192-10033-5 Introduction to Brighton Rock by Graham Greene (Penguin Classics) ISBN 0-142-43797-2 Introduction to Dangling Man by Saul Bellow (Penguin Classics) ISBN 0-143-03987-3 Coetzee, J. M. (30 April 2009). "The Making of Samuel Beckett". The New York Review of Books 56 (7): 1316. http://www.nybooks.com/articles/22612.

Non-fiction

Translations and introductions

Book reviews Reviews Martha Dow Fehsenfeld and Lois More Overbeck (eds) (2009). The Letters of Samuel Beckett, Volume 1: 19291940. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0521867932. Film and TV adaptations

Dust (1985), based on In the Heart of the Country The Lives of Animals (2002) Disgrace (2008)

See also List of African writers

References 1. ^ Sangster, Catherine (2009-09-14). "How to Say: JM Coetzee and other Booker authors". BBC News.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/magazinemonitor/2009/09/how_to_say_3.shtml. Retrieved 2009-10-01.

2. 3.

^ Attridge, Derek (2004). J. M. Coetzee and the Ethics of Reading: Literature in the Event. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. p. 94. ISBN 9780226031170. ^ Richards Cooper, Rand (1997-11-02). "Portrait of the writer as an Afrikaner". New York Times. http://www.nytimes.com/1997/11/02/books/portrait-of-the-writer-as-an-afrikaner.html. Retrieved 2009-10-09.

4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9.

^ a b c d e f g h Head, Dominic (2009). The Cambridge Introduction to J. M. Coetzee. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. pp. 12. ISBN 0521687098. ^ a b c d Price, Jonathan (Autumn 2000). "J.M. Coetzee". Emory University. http://www.english.emory.edu/Bahri/Coetzee.html. Retrieved 2009-08-01. ^ "A Nobel calling: 100 years of controversy". The Independent. 2005-10-14. http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/a-nobel-calling-100-years-of-controversy-510876.html. Retrieved 200908-02. ^ "Na polski trop naprowadzi go pradziad" (in Polish). PAP: Nauka w Polsce. 2006-06-16. http://www.eduskrypt.pl/na_polski_trop_naprowadzil_go_pradziad-info-1801.html. Retrieved 2009-08-02. ^ Lowry, Elizabeth (2007-08-22). "J. M. Coetzee's ruffled mirrors". Times Literary Supplement (London). http://tls.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,25339-2648841,00.html. Retrieved 2009-08-02. ^ Easton, John; Friedman, Allan; Harms, William; Koppes, Steve; Sanders, Seth (2003-09-23). "Faculty receive DSPs, named professorships". University of Chicago Chronicle. http://chronicle.uchicago.edu/030925/dsp-named.shtml. Retrieved 2009-08-02. "Professor John "JM" COETZEE". Who's Who of Southern Africa. http://www.whoswhosa.co.za/Pages/profilefull.aspx? IndID=5422. Retrieved 2009-08-02.
a b c "J. M. Coetzee". The Nobel Foundation. 2003. http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/2003/coetzeebio.html. Retrieved 2009-08-01. a b

10. ^ 11. ^

12. ^ Gallagher, Susan (1991). A Story of South Africa: J. M. Coetzee's Fiction in Context. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press. p. 194. ISBN 0674839722.

13. ^ Scanlan, Margaret (1997). "Incriminating documents: Nechaev and Dostoevsky in J. M. Coetzee's The Master of St
Petersburg". Philological Quarterly 76 (4): 463477.

14. ^ Pearlman, Mickey (2005-09-18). "J.M. Coetzee again sheds light on the 'black gloom' of isolation". Star Tribune: p. 14F. 15. ^ Massie, Allan (2002-04-27). "Book review: Youth by JM Coetzee". The Scotsman.
http://living.scotsman.com/Register.aspx?ReturnURL=http%3A%2F%2Fliving.scotsman.com%2Ffeatures%2FBOOKREVIEW-Youth-by-JM.2322061.jp. Retrieved 2009-10-09.

16. ^ "A rare interview with literary giant J. M. Coetzee". Buffalo News: p. E1. 2002-10-13. 17. ^ "JM Coetzee becomes an Australian citizen". Mail & Guardian. 2006-03-06. http://www.mg.co.za/articlePage.aspx?
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articleid=265916&area=/breaking_news/breaking_news__national/. Retrieved 2007-08-18.

18. ^ "Professor Dorothy Driver". University of Adelaide. http://www.adelaide.edu.au/directory/dorothy.driver. Retrieved 200908-02.

19. ^ Richmond, Chris (2007). "John M. Coetzee". in Badge, Peter. Nobel Faces: A Gallery of Nobel Prize Winners. Weinheim:
Wiley-VCH. pp. 428429. ISBN 3527406786. http://books.google.co.uk/books? id=SRD2K80JYpYC&lpg=PA428&ots=8ED4BS-rnY&dq=Committee%20on%20Social%20Thought%20Coetzee %202003&pg=PA428#v=onepage&q=&f=false.

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a b "The reclusive Nobel Prize winner: J. M. Coetzee". South African Tourism. http://www.southafrica.net/sat/content/en/us/full-article?oid=16723&sn=Detail&pid=7744. Retrieved 2009-08-02. a b Pienaar, Hans (2003-10-03). "Brilliant yet aloof, Coetzee at last wins Nobel prize for literature". The Independent. http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/news/brilliant-yet-aloof-coetzee-at-last-wins-nobel-prize-forliterature-581951.html. Retrieved 2009-08-01.

22. ^ Smith, Sandra (2003-10-07). "What to say about ... JM Coetzee". The Guardian.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2003/oct/07/theeditorpressreview.jmcoetzee. Retrieved 2009-08-01.

23. ^ Cowley, Jason (1999-10-25). "The New Statesman Profile - J M Coetzee". New Stateman.
http://www.newstatesman.com/199910250011. Retrieved 2009-08-02.

24. ^ Bray, Nancy. "How The First Chapter Series was born". Booker Prize Foundation.
http://www.themanbookerprize.com/perspective/articles/1198. Retrieved 2009-08-02.

25. ^ Coetzee, J. M. (2007-02-22). "Animals can't speak for themselves it's up to us to do it". The Age.
http://www.theage.com.au/news/opinion/animals-cant-speak-for-themselves--its-up-to-us/2007/02/21/1171733841769.html. Retrieved 2009-08-02.

26. ^ Coetzee, J. M. (2007-02-22). "A word from J.M. Coetzee Voiceless: I feel therefore I am". Voiceless.
http://www.voiceless.org.au/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=410&Itemid=369. Retrieved 2009-08-02.

27. ^ "About us". Voiceless. http://www.voiceless.org.au/About_Us/Misc/About_Us.html. Retrieved 2009-08-02. 28. ^ "JM Coetzee on animal rights". Food24. http://www.food24.com/Food24/Components/F24_Cuisine_Scene_Article/0,,112-14-65_12940,00.html. Retrieved 2009-08-02.

29. ^ Lake, Ed (2009-08-01). "Starry-eyed Booker Prize". The National. http://www.thenational.ae/apps/pbcs.dll/article?

AID=/20090802/ART/708019974/1007. Retrieved 2009-08-01.

30. ^

a b O'Neil, Patrick M. (2004). Great World Writers: Twentieth Century. London: Marshall Cavendish. pp. 225244. ISBN 0761474684. http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=WWMyyHvajoEC&lpg=PA229&ots=sG7rQtR1NU&dq=faber %20memorial%20prize%20coetzee&pg=PA229#v=onepage&q=&f=false.

31. ^ Banville, John (2003-10-16). "Being and nothingness". The Nation. http://www.thenation.com/doc/20031103/banville.
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Killam, Douglas; Kerfoot, Alicia L. (2007). "Coetzee, J(ohn) M(axwell)". Student Encyclopedia of African Literature. Westport, CT: Greenwood. pp. 9293. ISBN 031333580X. http://books.google.co.uk/books? id=hhGcVjjHTdkC&lpg=PA92&ots=9b0OcTx0Jz&dq=jm%20coetzee%20strathclyde %20honorary&pg=PA92#v=onepage&q=&f=false.
a b a b

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"J M Coetzee". Booker Prize Foundation. http://www.themanbookerprize.com/prize/authors/24. Retrieved 2009-08-02.

"Coetzee, getting prize, denounces apartheid". New York Times. 1987-04-11. http://www.nytimes.com/1987/04/11/arts/coetzee-getting-prize-denounces-apartheid.html. Retrieved 2009-08-02. http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/1999/oct/26/fiachragibbons. Retrieved 2009-08-02.

35. ^ Gibbons, Fiachra (1999-10-26). "Absent Coetzee wins surprise second Booker award". The Guardian. 36. ^ Brown, Mark (2009-07-28). "Heavyweights clash on Booker longlist". The Guardian.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2009/jul/28/heavyweights-clash-booker-longlist. Retrieved 2009-08-01.

37. ^ Flood, Alison (2009-07-29). "Coetzee leads the bookies' Booker race". The Guardian.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2009/jul/29/booker-prize-jmcoetzee. Retrieved 2009-08-01.

38. ^ Langley, William (2009-09-04). "Man Booker Prize: J.M Coetzee profile". Daily Telegraph.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/books-life/6138481/Man-Booker-Prize-J.M-Coetzee-profile.html. Retrieved 200909-08.

39. ^ "Mantel named Booker prize winner". BBC News. 2009-10-06. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/8292488.stm.
Retrieved 2009-10-06.

40. ^ "Coetzee wins Nobel literature prize". BBC News. 2003-10-02. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/3158278.stm.
Retrieved 2009-08-02.

41. ^ 42. ^

a b "Coetzee receives Nobel honour". BBC News. 2003-12-10. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/3305847.stm. Retrieved 2009-08-02.

"The Nobel Prize in Literature: John Maxwell Coetzee". Swedish Academy. 2003-10-02. http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/2003/press.html. Retrieved 2009-08-02. http://www.thepresidency.gov.za/orders_list.asp?show=69. Retrieved 2009-08-02.

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43. ^ "The Order of Mapungubwe in Gold". The Presidency, Republic of South Africa. 44. ^ "JM Coetzee receives honorary doctorate". University of Adelaide. 2005-12-20.
http://www.adelaide.edu.au/news/news8841.html. Retrieved 2009-08-02.

45. ^ "Honorary degrees". La Trobe University. http://www.latrobe.edu.au/eap/degrees.html. Retrieved 2009-08-02. 46. ^ "John M. Coetzee". University of Texas at Austin.
http://www.utexas.edu/ogs/awards/alumnus/awardpages/j_coetzee.html. Retrieved 2009-08-02.

47. ^ "Oxford honours arts figures". BBC News. 2002-06-21. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/arts/2054507.stm.

Retrieved 2009-08-02.

48. ^ "SA writer honoured by Rhodes". Daily Dispatch. 1999-04-12.

http://www.dispatch.co.za/1999/04/12/easterncape/HONOURED.HTM. Retrieved 2009-08-02.

49. ^ "New honour for Nobel laureate". University of Technology, Sydney. 2008-10-01.
http://www.newsroom.uts.edu.au/news/detail.cfm?ItemId=12567. Retrieved 2009-08-02.

50. ^ Coetzee, J. M. (1992). Attwell, David. ed. Doubling the Point: Essays and Interviews. Harvard University Press:
Cambridge, MA. p. 394. ISBN 0674215184. http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=dZ7_o8ElbQoC&lpg=PP1&dq=doubling %20the%20point&pg=PA394#v=onepage&q=&f=false.

51. ^

a b Poyner, Jane, ed (2006). "J. M. Coetzee in conversation with Jane Poyner". J. M. Coetzee and the Idea of the Public Intellectual. Athens, OH: Ohio University Press. p. 22. ISBN 0821416871. http://books.google.co.uk/books? id=BalLL9BL4acC&lpg=PA237&dq=%22J.%20M.%20Coetzee%20and%20the%20Ethics%20of%20Reading%3A %20Literature%20in%20the%20Event%22&pg=PA22#v=onepage&q=&f=false.

52. ^ Pfeil, Fred (1986-06-21). "Sexual healing". The Nation. http://www.thenation.com/archive/detail/12362753. Retrieved
2009-08-02.

53. ^ Diala, Isidore (2002). "Nadine Gordimer, J. M. Coetzee, and Andr Brink: Guilt, expiation, and the reconciliation process
in post-apartheid South Africa". Journal of Modern Literature 25 (2): 5068. doi:10.1353/jml.2003.0004.

54. ^ Poyner, Jane (2000). "Truth and reconciliation in JM Coetzee's Disgrace (novel)". Scrutiny2: Issues in English Studies in
Southern Africa 5 (2): 6777. doi:10.1080/18125440008565972.

55. ^ Jolly, Rosemary (2006). (novel) "Going to the dogs: Humanity in J. M. Coetzee's Disgrace, The Lives of Animals, and
South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission". in Poyner, Jane. J. M. Coetzee and the Idea of the Public Intellectual. Athens, OH: Ohio University Press. p. 149. ISBN 0821416871. http://books.google.co.uk/books? id=BalLL9BL4acC&lpg=PA103&ots=T-q6iMm8iH&dq=jm%20coetzee%20Disgrace (novel).

56. ^ Laurence, Patrick (2007-09-27). "JM Coetzee incites an ANC egg-dance". Helen Suzman Foundation.
http://www.hsf.org.za/resource-centre/focus/issues-31-40/issue-32-fourth-quarter-2003/jm-coetzee-incites-an-anc-eggdance. Retrieved 2009-08-02.

57. ^ "JM Coetzee joins criticism of Australia terror law plan". The Citizen. 2005-10-24.
http://www.citizen.co.za/index/article.aspx?pDesc=9396,1,22. Retrieved 2009-08-02.

58. ^ Moses, Michael Valdez (July 2008). "State of discontent: J.M. Coetzee's anti-political fiction". Reason.
http://www.reason.com/news/show/126870.html. Retrieved 2009-08-02.

59. ^ Hope, Deborah (2007-08-25). "Coetzee 'diary' targets PM". The Australian.
http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,22303991-5001986,00.html. Retrieved 2009-08-02.

External links
Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: J. M. Coetzee

J. M. Coetzee at the Nobel Prize Internet Archive Coetzee Nobel Prize Lecture Swedish Academy Press Release J. M. Coetzee in the New York Times Archives An academic blog about writing a dissertation on Coetzee Coetzee article archive from The New York Review of Books Video: J. M. Coetzee speaks about fundamentalism, curiosity and Patrick Allington's Figurehead

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