doubling the point

i've long wondered what it is about Disgrace -- and by extension, most of Coetzee's work up to Disgrace -- that so holds my attention, that i feel such an affinity with. It certainly isn't the politics, and definitely nothing to do with "the itch of the male flesh". i've always known it has to be something about the spirit of his work, the particular kind of intellect and way of thinking that animates his writing. It's something to do with the mind doubling in on itself, i think -- 'doubling the point', as Coetzee himself called it in his eponymous collection of critical essays. That, and i think, the harrowing austerity of his created world, reflected in the knife-like starkness of his prose. And there's something else, i think -- something far less easy to articulate, and that fewer critics have picked up because, i think, the secular mind is simply not as primed to notice these things as someone with a strong spiritual faith might be: i think his earlier novels are deeply concerned with the question of What will save us from ourselves? They ask questions that are religious in aspiration -- but his answers are secular, and preclude a sense of the divine. That alone makes them deeply fascinating, i think -- the struggle is there, and it's real. i wonder if he's come to any peace about it after all this time.
.
Here's another stab at the beast that is the mystery of my Coetzee fascination, this time from a Guardian review of Disgrace which puts it at #99 (only 99?*) of a list of 100 best novels (presumably in the English language ... ):
.
"Any novel set in post-apartheid South Africa is fated to be read as a political portrait, but the fascination of Disgrace - a somewhat perverse fascination, as some will feel - is the way it both encourages and contests such a reading by holding extreme alternatives in tension. Salvation, ruin. Even a single paragraph can accommodate the transformation of hope into its opposite ..."  (Adam Mars-Jones)
.
(* 'only 99' -- because the list is in chronological order)
.
.