JM Coetzee - a man of few words

2003-11-21 14:41

New York - After swearing never to give another public lecture, JM Coetzee, this year's Nobel laureate for literature, wondered aloud why he was speaking in front of a crowded auditorium.

The 63-year-old South African said little to the crowd at The New York Public Library on Thursday night. Instead he borrowed from the words of the protagonist of his new novel Elizabeth Costello, the story of a 70-year-old Australian author who finds herself increasingly weary of public life.

"I deplore what the world is coming to," he read. "But when I say that, I hear my mother who deplored the miniskirt, who deplored the electric guitar. ... It's not the grand sweep of history, it's the details I deplore."

Coetzee himself is a solitary figure, a quiet, soft-eyed man who rarely communicates with the media and prefers doing so by e-mail. He declined even to show up to collect his Booker prizes and would not speak to reporters after winning the Nobel last month.

He made his debut as a writer of fiction in 1974, but his international breakthrough came in 1980 with the novel Waiting for the Barbarians.

A fundamental theme in his novels are based on South African reality, but often presented in a timeless, metafictional form and carrying a plurality of meanings.

In the Life & Times of Michael K, Waiting for the Barbarians and others, he writes of men and women doing their best to duck under history or simply float above it.

Coetzee is currently a visiting professor at the University of Chicago's Committee on Social Thought. Fellow South African writer Nadine Gordimer, won the Nobel in 1991 not long before the fall of apartheid, the brutal system of racial segregation.

Both were white opponents of apartheid. But Coetzee thinks of the novel differently.

Gordimer, following in the tradition of such politically minded South African writers as Alan Paton and Athol Fugard, spoke of fiction's subversive power: Imagining a revolution can make it more likely to happen.

Coetzee, following in the tradition of such existential European writers as Dostoevsky and Kafka, questioned whether the novel was an effective way to comment upon current events.

- AP