Life & Background
John Maxwell Coetzee was born in Cape Town in 1940 to Afrikaner parents who spoke English at home, a divided position he has written about at length. He worked as a computer programmer in London in the 1960s, took a doctorate in the United States on Beckett's style using early computational stylistics, and was refused permanent residency there after taking part in protests against the Vietnam War. He taught at the University of Cape Town for many years. Famously private, he declined to attend either Booker ceremony and gives almost no interviews. He emigrated to Australia in 2002 and took citizenship there in 2006. He won the Nobel Prize in 2003. He has been a vegetarian and an advocate for animals, an argument pursued directly in The Lives of Animals.
Disgrace
David Lurie, a fifty-two-year-old professor of communications in Cape Town, has an affair with a student, Melanie. Charged with harassment, he admits the facts but refuses to make the statement of contrition the committee wants, and resigns. He goes to stay with his daughter Lucy on her smallholding in the Eastern Cape. Three men come to the farm: they lock him in a bathroom and set him alight, shoot the dogs in the kennels, and rape Lucy. She refuses to report the rape, refuses to leave, and eventually accepts an arrangement in which she becomes the third wife of her neighbour Petrus in exchange for protection, and keeps the child. Lurie, unable to accept any of it, ends up assisting at an animal clinic, carrying dead dogs to the incinerator.
The novel was published five years after the end of apartheid and during the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, and its central refusals — Lurie will not confess in the terms demanded, Lucy will not testify — are in direct conversation with that process. It drew a formal complaint from the ANC, which submitted it to a human rights inquiry as evidence of racism in the depiction of the attackers. Coetzee's prose is spare, present-tense, and withholding; he refuses interiority to almost everyone but Lurie, which is either the novel's limitation or its subject. His metafictional later work, including Elizabeth Costello, delivers arguments through a novelist character in a way that resists being pinned to the author.
Why Coetzee Matters
Coetzee is the major post-apartheid novelist and the first writer to win the Booker twice. Foe, which rewrites Robinson Crusoe with a woman narrator and a Friday whose tongue has been cut out, is a central text in postcolonial theory and is read alongside Spivak. Waiting for the Barbarians is a standard allegory of empire and torture. For examinations he is essential on South African writing, on allegory, and on the ethics of representation.
Key Facts
All Major Works
- Dusklands1974
- Waiting for the Barbarians1980
- Life & Times of Michael K1983
- Foe1986
- Age of Iron1990
- Disgrace1999
- Elizabeth Costello2003