a spare, thrifty world

Now that I'm onto this business of putting up things I'm surprised I haven't put up earlier, it's high time that Nobel Prize-winning novelist J.M. Coetzee got some column space.

I've always loved Coetzee's writing. He's one writer who makes me feel that every single word he writes is carefully weighed and absolutely essential. This is the case, whatever the style of the particular piece.

Here's the man himself on his use of language:

"...when I write myself I... quite laboriously search out the right word. I do believe in spareness. Spare prose and a spare, thrifty world."

Here's the last paragraph of his Booker-winning novel, Life & Times of Michael K. Don't worry so much about the context - suffice to say that it's a novel that's partly about resilience - just savour the language and the clear yet unforced symbolism:

"And if the old man climbed out of the cart and stretched himself (things were gathering pace now) and looked at where the pump had been that the soldiers had blown up so that nothing should be left standing, and complained, saying, "What are we going to do about water?", he, Michael K, would produce a teaspoon from his pocket, a teaspoon and a long roll of string. He would clear the rubble from the mouth of the shaft, he would bend the handle of the teaspoon in a loop and tie the string to it, he would lower it down the shaft deep into the earth, and when he brought it up there would be water in the bowl of the spoon; and in that way, he would say, one can live."
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