22nd Jun 2008
Diary of a Bad Year
Diary of a Bad Year by J.M. Coetzee
My review
rating: 4 of 5 stars
Fiction in which a writer is the protagonist bores me. Faulting the author for too little imagination, I imagine the protagonist to be an ill-veiled version of the real person, the author. Indeed, the protagonist of Diary of a Bad Year is a writer, a writer who is perhaps named Juan C. (The author’s name is John Maxwell, or J. M. Coetzee.)
That’s my own personal bias, not any kind of objective truth — but here’s another piece of much more reputable advice that this book ignores. Don’t build a book around your political agenda. Not only does Coetzee do this, he does it completely blatantly, with little narrative intertwined.
The protagonist has contracted with a German publisher to contribute to a collection of of six authors’ “Strong Opinions.” Those opinions, such as “On Language,” and “On Intelligent Design,” are short non-fiction passages from an old man to the world he finds himself living within.
About assigning the opinions of Señor C to Coetzee, The New Yorker says this:
Many of the protagonist’s essays are reproduced in the novel we are reading. Naturally, the reader wants to make Coetzee’s novels confessional, to claim these opinions as his rightful children. But Coetzee explicitly complicates the question of his paternity, so that these books read less like confessions than like books about confession.
This is an idea I consider, but at best I see Señor C as a self-conscious exaggeration of the author, not as being of an entirely different character than the man who created him. As Coetzee is notoriously reclusive, we may never know how closely the two resemble each other.
But there’s something else much more compelling in the book’s structure. Below each page of the writer’s “Strong Opinions” is a footnote of sorts, finally the narrative we need to hold our interest through this barrage of editorial. The story that surrounds the writing of the opinions is told by the writer, in the first person.
And both are good. Both are engaging, and if we prefer the narrative (which is generally limited in page real estate to less than a third, and often ends leaving white space), we are soon rewarded with more — a third section on each page representing our romantic-platonic leading lady, also told in the first person.
About the opinions I won’t say much, except that I agreed with many, including some harsher reviews of our American Empire. What’s very interesting in the reading of the book is that depending on the story that is taking place, the opinions seem more or less valid — as you grow to know the writer, your opinion of his opinions changes and adjusts. Ultimately, you are left to miss the author’s narrative voice altogether, left with only his opinions and those of Anya, his typist. Could this be the demise of us all, survived only by our strongest opinions and others’ somewhat misinformed ideas about us?
Reading this book is an experience I recommend. Its engaging, lively structure contains a story of its own.
Diary of a Bad Year by J.M. Coetzee
My review
rating: 4 of 5 stars
Fiction in which a writer is the protagonist bores me. Faulting the author for too little imagination, I imagine the protagonist to be an ill-veiled version of the real person, the author. Indeed, the protagonist of Diary of a Bad Year is a writer, a writer who is perhaps named Juan C. (The author’s name is John Maxwell, or J. M. Coetzee.)
That’s my own personal bias, not any kind of objective truth — but here’s another piece of much more reputable advice that this book ignores. Don’t build a book around your political agenda. Not only does Coetzee do this, he does it completely blatantly, with little narrative intertwined.
The protagonist has contracted with a German publisher to contribute to a collection of of six authors’ “Strong Opinions.” Those opinions, such as “On Language,” and “On Intelligent Design,” are short non-fiction passages from an old man to the world he finds himself living within.
About assigning the opinions of Señor C to Coetzee, The New Yorker says this:
Many of the protagonist’s essays are reproduced in the novel we are reading. Naturally, the reader wants to make Coetzee’s novels confessional, to claim these opinions as his rightful children. But Coetzee explicitly complicates the question of his paternity, so that these books read less like confessions than like books about confession.
This is an idea I consider, but at best I see Señor C as a self-conscious exaggeration of the author, not as being of an entirely different character than the man who created him. As Coetzee is notoriously reclusive, we may never know how closely the two resemble each other.
But there’s something else much more compelling in the book’s structure. Below each page of the writer’s “Strong Opinions” is a footnote of sorts, finally the narrative we need to hold our interest through this barrage of editorial. The story that surrounds the writing of the opinions is told by the writer, in the first person.
And both are good. Both are engaging, and if we prefer the narrative (which is generally limited in page real estate to less than a third, and often ends leaving white space), we are soon rewarded with more — a third section on each page representing our romantic-platonic leading lady, also told in the first person.
About the opinions I won’t say much, except that I agreed with many, including some harsher reviews of our American Empire. What’s very interesting in the reading of the book is that depending on the story that is taking place, the opinions seem more or less valid — as you grow to know the writer, your opinion of his opinions changes and adjusts. Ultimately, you are left to miss the author’s narrative voice altogether, left with only his opinions and those of Anya, his typist. Could this be the demise of us all, survived only by our strongest opinions and others’ somewhat misinformed ideas about us?
Reading this book is an experience I recommend. Its engaging, lively structure contains a story of its own.
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