speculation

So, my theory about Coetzee's writing after looking at his two earliest novels, Dusklands and In the Heart of the Country, which are about as rich and lushly lyrical (or, the way I see it, wanky, self-indulgent) as those of any number of other gifted prose stylists: later Coetzee's stripped-bare language is his response to loss and suffering. He's lost so much - a wife (first to divorce, then cancer), a son (to possible suicide), and a native country (even though that particular loss was chosen). In the midst of such losses, what can one do, but retreat into silence? Or, if one must speak, surely all but the barest of words must seem superfluous? Remember Lear ("Never, never, never, never, never"), and the way his rotund eloquence finally turns to what would be child-like simplicity if the words were not so heart-rendingly painful.

Reading earlier Coetzee, I've realised that the reason I've stopped reading novels for so long is that I can no longer take the way most fiction, simply by way of its prose style, imposes such rich other-worlds on its readers. Too much, too much. It's sensory overload. And emotional, psychological overload as well - in any good novel, the characters' burdens become one's own and one starts to share a little of their lives. Perhaps sometimes one has enough burdens of one's own - there is no need to take on more.

Early Coetzee reads like a completely different writer from the Coetzee I've come to know. I'm glad I started with his later work.
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