J.M. Coetzee: Summertime

We have been here before, albeit in different forms. Almost without exception, Coetzee’s work from Elizabeth Costello on has been concerned with the role of authors and authorship, not only of fiction but of memoirs ...

Jean Eustache: Mes petites amoureuses

Childhood, says the Children’s Encyclopaedia, is a time of innocent joy, to be spent in the meadows amid buttercups and bunny-rabbits or at the hearthside absorbed in a storybook. It is a vision of childhood ...

Faulkner’s Light in August and Coetzee’s Disgrace

Light in August is Faulkner’s longest book and certainly the most plainspoken of the early works, even more so than As I Lay Dying. I don’t think of Faulkner’s stream-of-consciousness techniques as being integral to ...

Coetzee on Beckett

This isn’t really connected to the review below, other than that it came from my desire to read some intelligent opinions of Coetzee’s own, which sent me back to his excellent collection Doubling the Point, ...

J.M. Coetzee: Diary of a Bad Year

This is the third book in a series that began with Elizabeth Costello and continued with Slow Man. These books are fundamentally about being a writer who has won the Nobel Prize. Perhaps Coetzee keeps ...

Laszlo Krasznahorkai: War and War

RIP Grant McLennan