Stranger Shores: Literary Essays, 1986-1999 FROM THE PUBLISHER
The only author ever to win the Booker Prize twice, J. M. Coetzee is one of the world's greatest novelists. Now his many admirers can have the pleasure of reading his significant body of literary criticism. This volume gathers together for the first time in book form twenty-six pieces on books and writing. Stranger Shores opens with "What Is a Classic?" in which Coetzee explores the answer to his own question -- "What does it mean in living terms to say that the classic is what survives?" -- by way of T. S. Eliot, Johann Sebastian Bach and Zbigniew Herbert. His subjects range from the great eighteenth- and nineteenth-century writers Daniel Defoe, Samuel Richardson, and Ivan Turgenev to the great German modernists Rilke, Kafka, and Musil to the giants of late-twentieth-century literature, among them Harry Mulisch, Joseph Brodsky, Jorge Luis Borges, Salman Rushdie, Amos Oz, Naguib Mahfouz, Nadine Gordimer, and Doris Lessing.
FROM THE CRITICS
Publishers Weekly
Tackling works by Rushdie, Naguib Mahfouz, Doris Lessing, Borges and A.S. Byatt, Stranger Shores: Literary Essays collects critical work by South African author and two-time Booker-winner J.M. Coetzee. Coetzee posits in "What Is a Classic" that "[c]riticism... is duty-bound to interrogate the classic" and thereby "may be what the classic uses to define itself and ensure its survival." None of these thoughtful, deft and erudite essays, all but one of which were previously published, land heavily or obviously (if at all) on any side of a literary, critical or political issue like Coetzee's poised fiction. (Aug. 27) Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.
Library Journal
Coetzee (Waiting for the Barbarians) is one of South Africa's major novelists. In this collection of 26 essays, many of them first published in the New York Review of Books, he gives careful, fair-minded, and nuanced readings of many different authors. Coetzee is especially concerned and attentive to questions of translation and the craft of the novelist. Dutch authors (Marcellus Emants and Harry Mulisch) are insightfully covered, as are African authors (Nadine Gordimer and Breyten Breytenbach). The essays on European writers Rainer Maria Rilke, Franz Kafka, and Robert Musil and on Middle Eastern authors Aharon Appelfeld, Amos Oz, and Naguib Mahfouz reveal Coetzee's great insights in history, politics, and the relationships of literature to culture and society. Finally, a review of Noel Mostert's epic Frontiers powerfully depicts the harsh history of South Africa. Coetzee honestly states his agreements and differences with the authors he reviews. Recommended for literature collections. [Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 4/15/01.] Gene Shaw, NYPL Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.
Kirkus Reviews
A striking collection of 26 literary essays, many taken from "The New York Review of Books", that amply display Coetzee's freethinking erudition and go-your-own-way intellectual honesty. In prose that is smooth as milk over the bottle's lip, Coetzee ("Disgrace", 2000, etc.) unleashes his take on a battery of writers ranging from Samuel Richardson and Daniel Dafoe to William Gass and Daphne Rooke. He chides Salman Rushdie for not knowing what he's talking about ("with all respect due to the author, one must demure"), even when what he's talking about is "The Moor's Last Sigh". He covers Joseph Brodsky's critical poetics in a voice that is as vibrant as the Russian's own, and he wittily observes that A.S. Byatt's characters "in times of crisis ... do not go into therapy." There are quick, lambent biographies of Breyten Breytenbach, Noel Mostert, Alan Paton, and Helen Suzman, as well as one of Thomas Pringle, father of English-language poetry in South Africa (whom Coetzee garrotes, labeling his work "indifferent"). He cuts Cees Nooteboom for his lack of anguish over the expulsion of heartfelt imagination from the world, but he applauds fellow Dutchman Harry Mulisch's sure handling of the "terrible fissure in European history opened by the Holocaust." He lauds Amos Oz for that same sure hand, accompanied by a light touch, in his politically-charged novels set in the fluid margins of Israel. Coetzee allows his emotional sentiments to percolate through these critiques and tries to measure the same in his subjects, as in an essay on Nadine Gordimer reconnoitering the realm of the artist's special calling, that "art tells a truth transcending the truth of history," wherein the goal of writingcan strive for the transformation of society. Deeply intelligent, provocative, and enjoyable literary investigations.
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