Preparing for a 1-2 week long sick leave. Also have 5 books from NetGalley. Do you think this is enough? 🫣
pickI‘m working through some Booker listed books i‘ve own. This is the 1999 winner, and probably Coetzee‘s most well-known work.
It‘s fantastic, unsettling, dark. Lit prof David Lurie sleeps around, and a maybe rape of a student ends his career in disgrace. His Dantean hell is to go to his daughter‘s farm. He loves his daughter. What happens there parallels his own crimes. Coetzee keeps it moving, keeps the reader glued and surprised. Fantastic.
pickI‘m not sure how to feel here. There are two different stories. One story follows an an agent involved with the Vietnam Project, his obsession, and his descent into madness. The second story is about Jacobus Coetzee, a white settler in 18th century South Africa on a hunting expeditions that goes awry. I‘m not going to sit here and say I *enjoyed* spending time with either of these men, but I think that‘s the point. 242/1,001 #1001Books
pickWalking embodiment of the patriarchy Prof David Lurie creates a situation for which he will pay dearly if not learn. His disgrace sends him to his daughter‘s place in the country where we get to see his racism, too. At once an exploration of attitudes that need to disappear and post-apartheid South Africa, this book is brilliant. Glad I finally read it.
pickWhat to make of a novel of essays? Apparently JMC took his own published essays and their criticism (good, tough criticism) and made a novel out of it, with an afterlife confrontation added in. Of course, these are Elizabeth Costello‘s speeches in the book.
So it works and also doesn‘t. First chapter of Realism is fantastic. Later obsession with the morality on veganism was ok - but, i had trouble caring. But i still kind of liked it overall.
Still warming my cat (and vice versa). Trying out Coetzee. Lovely 1st chapter toying with perspectives on Realism.
so-soThis book was a really difficult read because it was very upsetting. It is representative of South Africa and the tumultuous racial issues that are present there. I did not know enough to see the analogy and recognize that is a big reason why the book didn‘t resonate with me. 3/5
so-soA young black man is imprisoned for allegations of rape of a white woman in apartheid South Africa. As he sits in his prison cell awaiting execution, he recollects to a Swiss psychoanalyst his boyhood, his parents, his ambitions to become his country's preeminent writer: a life disrupted by an infatuation he develops for a woman suntanning on a segregated beach.
panI can see where the author was going but I just wasn‘t there with him.
