Stony Ground

Peter D. McDonald

  • J.M. Coetzee and the Ethics of Reading: Literature in the Event by Derek Attridge
    Chicago, 225 pp, £13.50, May 2005, ISBN 0 226 03117 9
  • Slow Man by J.M. Coetzee
    Secker, 265 pp, £16.99, September 2005, ISBN 0 436 20611 0

In a respectful but chary review of The Life and Times of Michael K (1983) in the New York Review of Books, Nadine Gordimer wrote about J.M. Coetzee’s ‘conscious choice’ of allegory as a literary mode in his first three novels. The reasons for this, she speculated, were temperamental:

It seemed he did so out of a kind of opposing desire to hold himself clear of events and their daily, grubby, tragic consequences in which, like everyone else living in South Africa, he is up to the neck, and about which he had an inner compulsion to write. So here was allegory as a stately fastidiousness; or a state of shock.

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[*] Routledge, 178 pp., £12.99, April 2004, 0 415 33593 0.

Vol. 27 No. 20 · 20 October 2005 » Peter D. McDonald » Stony Ground (print version)
Pages 24-25 | 3609 words