obsession

The Coetzee fandom continues unabated. Actually, it's running rabid. Now that I'm done with his latest books, I'm going backwards to the less-known, not-quite-so-prizewinning earlier works, and oh, how I love them all, every single one. This is the first time in my life I've been this way about any writer. Most of the time, I find something to dislike or to be disappointed by fairly quickly. Not with Coetzee. I think this is becoming an obsession. And I don't mean that in the flippant way I usually use that word, either.

Here's something taken from the back cover of Boyhood, which I think captures the essence of Coetzee's writing for me.

'As funny, cruel and terrifying as life itself. It is also intense and elegant, clearly the product of (a) complex, subtle imagination... Austerely beautiful... (with an) aloof, edgy grace and seething passion...' (Irish Times)

Ok, I dunno about 'seething' - sounds too drama-mama for Coetzee, but the rest of that, yeah, just about gets it. Here's an example of that passionate intensity combined with the sparest of prose (or, what P called 'baby English' - said the great P, "It's not easy to write in baby English."):

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'There is another first memory, one that he trusts more fully but would never repeat, certainly not to Greenberg and Goldstein, who would trumpet it around the school and turn him into a laughing-stock.

He is sitting beside his mother in a bus. It must be cold, for he is wearing red woollen leggings and a woollen cap with a bobble. The engine of the bus labours; they are ascending the wild and desolate Swartberg Pass.

In his hand is a sweet-wrapper. He holds the wrapper out of the window, which is open a crack. It flaps and trembles in the wind.

"Shall I let it go?" he asks his mother.

She nods. He lets it go.

The scrap of paper flies up into the sky. Below there is nothing but the grim abyss of the pass, ringed with cold mountainpeaks. Craning backwards, he catches a last glimpse of the paper, still bravely flying.

"What will happen to it?" he asks his mother; but she does not comprehend.

That is the other first memory, the secret one. He thinks all the time of the scrap of paper, alone in all that vastness, that he abandoned when he should not have abandoned it. One day he must go back to the Swatberg Pass and find it and rescue it. That is his duty: he may not die until he has done it.'

(from Boyhood)

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I think the other thing that so attracts me to his writing is that it's really survivor's writing. Maybe that's the link with the holocaust writing that I'm so drawn to as well. As Frost put it in 'The Oven Bird',

The question that he frames in all but words
Is what to make of a diminished thing.
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