Tuesday, March 12, 2013

The Childhood of Jesus by J M Coetzee, and A Life in Writing by J C Kannemeyer: review

J M Coetzee’s reputation as a master of bleakness misses the sly humour in his novels – shown to full effect in his latest dark comedy, The Childhood of Jesus, says Anthony Cummins.

J M Coetzee
J M Coetzee: On a pedestal? Photo: Paul Jackson
The YouTube clip still does the rounds, two years on: J M Coetzee, chairing a literary event in Adelaide, introduces Geoff Dyer, who takes the lectern, and says, “If someone had told me 20 years ago that I’d be here in Australia, and that I’d be introduced by a Booker-Prize-winning, South African, Nobel-Prize-winning novelist, I don’t know what I’d have said…” – the audience applauds – “Yeah, what would I have said? I’d probably have said: that’s incredible, because Nadine Gordimer is my favourite writer.”

The room laughs as Coetzee sits stone-faced, living up to a reputation that owes much to two lines from a 1990 profile by Rian Malan: “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.”

A major new biography, translated from the Afrikaans, shows us what happened when an interviewer (an Iraqi poet) asked if Malan had been exaggerating. Coetzee replied: “I have met Rian Malan only once in my life. He does not know me and is not qualified to talk about my character.” If you think that sounds terse, how about the exchange that followed: “What is your advice to the translators who want to translate your novels, especially Arabic translators?” “Pay attention to the words on the page and to the shape of the sentences.”

Coetzee’s biographer, J C Kannemeyer, who died as this book was being edited, seems to have read everything to do with his subject – quoting, at one point, a letter Coetzee wrote to a Dutch cycling magazine. Year by year he charts Coetzee’s life to date: from his English and Afrikaans-speaking childhood in the Western Cape; to his spells in Britain and America, where he wrote a PhD on Beckett; to his 30 years teaching literature at the University of Cape Town; and finally to his emigration, in 2002, to Australia. 

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