So J.M. Coetzee’s new novel is out – but only in Holland. They’ve had it for the last few weeks while we poor slobs here in the U.S. have to sit on our hands for another few months, until October 23rd. The Literary Saloon alerted me to the first English language review of Diary of a Bad Year. The reviewer praises it, but be prepared for a thorough discussion of the metafictional elements in Coetzee’s oeuvre. Check out the triptych structure described in this excerpt from the review:
Indeed, in the course of Diary of a Bad Year, JC becomes exquisitely alert to what he calls “the impostures of authorship”. Having been asked by a German publisher to contribute a run of essays to a book on “what is wrong with today’s world”, he sets about recording his opinions on a dictaphone tape – JC, whose handwriting is deteriorating due to a loss of fine muscular control, is suffering from Parkinson’s disease. His assumptions about the world, and his magisterial writerly stance, are, however, undermined by his encounters with Anya, the exotic young Filipino-Australian woman he meets in the laundry room of their apartment building, lusts after, and swiftly enlists as his typist. Anya not only types up the great man’s thoughts, but takes it on herself to “fix them up too here and there where I can”, generating a subtle, ongoing comedy of conflicting perspectives, as well as some cruder malapropisms thanks to her undiscriminating use of her computer’s spellcheck function (in her typescript Brezhnev’s generals sit “somewhere in the urinals”). The three layers of the text – JC’s philosophical essays, his heightened reflections on his meetings with Anya, and Anya’s own more sceptical version of their unfolding relationship – are presented in exactly the same order each time on successive pages, so that the novel resembles one of those segmented children’s books in which you end up with the head of a gorilla, the torso of a policeman and the legs of a ballerina (it is possible to read the different narratives discretely from start to finish, but not advisable, as each ligament of this hybrid is held in a weirdly elegant tension with the rest).
