To John Maxwell Coetzee, the four Nemeses novels of Philip Roth are “lesser additions” to his canon but he ferrets out an exchange between the protagonist of Everyman (2006), the unnamed ‘he’, and a gravedigger to explain the value of a 10-page embedded essay. From the gravedigger, ‘he’ elicits an account of how a good grave is dug and bids him farewell with these words: “I want to thank you... You couldn’t have made things more concrete. It’s a good education for an older person.” Coetzee lauds the “modest but beautifully composed” episode, saying it does indeed provide a good education, teaching us “how to dig a grave, how to write, how to face death, all in one.”
In Here and Now , a collection of letters Coetzee exchanged with American writer Paul Auster, he says that Roth usually “relishes the challenge of wringing something fresh out of stock situations.” This is a quality that is true of Coetzee’s books — and essays, as his re-reading of Flaubert’s much written about novel Madame Bovary shows.
The Nobel Laureate’s essays, collected in three volumes, Stranger Shores (1986-1999), Inner Workings (2000-2005) and Late Essays (2006-2017), some of which appeared in The New York Review of Books , give us a peek into the writers on his bookshelf. Some like Daniel Defoe, Franz Kafka and Samuel Beckett have served as the wellspring of his imagination, roots of Coetzee’s most celebrated novels including the Booker-winner Life and Times of Michael K . These are writers Coetzee loves going back to — four essays in the latest collection is dedicated to Beckett, who is also discussed in his letters with Auster. Coetzee examines Beckett’s relationship with his mother, the Joyces, his therapist Wilfred Bion, why he chose to make Paris his home and write in French.
His first collection ( Stranger Shores ) opens with the brilliant ‘What is a classic?’ where Coetzee defends the “interrogation” of a book or a writer as inevitable, even to be welcomed “for as long as the classic needs to be protected from attack, it can never prove itself classic;” and he writes about Defoe ( Robinson Crusoe ), Kafka, Borges, Doris Lessing and other luminaries. In Late Essays , there are his favourites like Defoe ( Roxanna ) but he also engages with German littérateurs (Goethe, Kleist) and the Jewish writer, Irène Némirovsky, who made her reputation in the English-speaking world with Suite Francaise , a novel that appeared in print only in 2004, 60 years after its author’s death. Whatever the subject, Coetzee’s well-crafted pieces, in spare prose, always plumb “the obscurer, more personal sources” of a writer’s urge to write.
Late Essays 2006-2017 ; J.M. Coetzee, Harvill Secker/ Penguin, ₹799.
