I didn’t read J. M. Coetzee’s fiction until about five years ago. I had read his half of an exchange of letters with Paul Auster, a Christmas present from my son, who knew about my interest Auster’s writing. My son thought I might be interested in what Auster wrote when he wasn’t consciously concocting something a step or two outside normal human existence, but close enough that it felt, well, right.
The fiction of Coetzee – who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2003 – came into my purview in 2019. The accidental combinati on of a chat with a scholar of English literature and mentions in newspaper articles about his fiction alerted me to Coetzee’s link to philosophical inquiry. I then read three of his books – The Life and Times of Michael K. (1983), Diary of a Bad Year (2007), and Elisabeth Costello (2001). Now this:
Waiting for the Barbarians (1980) is even more unsettling than the others …
Read the rest of Coetzee is waiting for meaning … on Substack.
