J. M. Coetzee

An interesting summary of the work of Nobel-prize winner J.M. Coetzee in the December 8 issue of The Weekly Standard . The reviewer, Michael Kochin, suggests that Coetzee, who is both an academic critic and a novelist, poses unique challenges to Western intellectuals, whether postmodern multiculturalists or conservative classicists. Kochin summarizes: “Coetzee is a disturbing writer because he excavates the lost possibilities of the Western tradition only to extinguish the hopes that we have wrongly placed in Western high culture. The white male academic, who reads Coetzee seeking self-knowledge, is told that his days are over by one who knows the promises and failures of Western literature as well as any critic of our time. Such a reader, to say nothing of others, must face the fact that after him will come not a global cultural wasteland, but something wholly new, whether local, peripheral, national, or global. From this rebirth, Coetzee claims, a reader sufficiently versed in Western high culture to appreciate Coetzee’s own critique is by virtue of that very knowledge excluded. Perhaps the most disturbing possibility Coetzee raises, for his typically secularist reader, might come out of Christian faith in the value of suffering, a faith that demands its believers spurn humanist affirmations of permanent value in the beauties of form.” Bracing stuff, that.