Nobel Oblige
Every year, when the Nobel prize for literature is awarded, I make an attempt at gathering up one or more significant works by the winner and acquainting myself with the reason the prize committee made their selection. The prizes are a long way off this year, but last year’s winner, J. M. Coetzee, was one writer I felt myself already sufficiently familiar with not to go out and buy the latest books. I did, however, during my late period of unemployment, go back to Waiting for the Barbarians, one of his early works, because it’s a great favorite of mine and one I hadn’t been back to since it came out in the ‘80s. Around this time, M. had been saying she’d like to read the most recent volume, Elizabeth Costello, which I located at a second-hand shop during my job hunting peregrinations. She really, really like it, so we also located a copy of Disgrace and have borrowed a copy of Boyhood, Coetzee’s memoir of growing up in South Africa. I’ve only gotten through Disgrace, but our copy of Elizabeth Costello should be coming home soon, so once I finish Patrick White’s The Vivisector (he’s the Australian Nobelist, by the way), I’ll get on to it. Coetzee’s prose is deceptive. He reminds me of Hemingway in the spareness of his style, but he wears his heart on his sleeve, too, without making a great point of it. I’d say his writing is some of the most Human I’ve read in a long time. He lets you make your own judgments without withholding his own and in a tempered, natural language. He’s living in Adelaide now. I would welcome a chance to hear him speak, although he doesn’t apparently do that often.