Academic and literary career
Coetzee relocated to the United Kingdom in 1962, where he worked as a computer programmer, staying until 1965. He worked for IBM in London. In 1963, while working in the UK, he was awarded a Master of Arts degree from the University of Cape Town for a dissertation on the novels of Ford Madox Ford. His experiences in England were later recounted in Youth (2002), his second volume of fictionalized memoirs.
Personality and reputation
Coetzee is known as reclusive and eschews publicity to such an extent that he did not collect either of his two Booker Prizes in person. Author Rian Malan has said that:
Coetzee is a man of almost monkish self-discipline and dedication. He does not drink, smoke or eat meat. He cycles vast distances to keep fit and spends at least an hour at his writing-desk each morning, seven days a week. A colleague who has worked with him for more than a decade claims to have seen him laugh just once. An acquaintance has attended several dinner parties where Coetzee has uttered not a single word.
يصفه بعض الاصدقاء بانه خجول ولا يحب الظهور ولم يستلم الجوائز التي فاز بها ويقول احد اصدقاؤه انه لا يدخن ولا يشرب الخمر ولا يأكل لحم كما انه رأه يضحك مرة واحدة طول معرفته به كما قال آخر انه كان يحضر مآدب عشاء لا يتحدث فيها ابدا
As a result of his reclusive nature, signed copies of Coetzee's fiction are highly sought after. Recognising this, he was a key figure in the establishment of Oak Tree Press's First Chapter Series, a series of limited edition signed works by literary greats to raise money for the child victims and orphans of the African HIV/AIDS crisis.
Political orientation
Writing about his past in the third person, Coetzee states in Doubling the Point that:
Politically, the raznochinets can go either way. But during his student years he, this person, this subject, my subject, steers clear of the right. As a child in Worcester he has seen enough of the Afrikaner right, enough of its rant, to last him a lifetime. In fact, even before Worcester he has perhaps seen more of cruelty and violence than should have been allowed to a child.
يقول في مذكراته عن طفولته انه شاهد في طفولته الكثير من اعمال اليمنين الافركانين ( البيض ) العنيفة ويقول انه رأى من العنف والقساوة ما لم يكن يجب السماح به لطفل ان يشاهده
So as a student he moves on the fringes of the left without being part of the left. Sympathetic to the human concerns of the left, he is alienated, when the crunch comes, by its language – by all political language, in fact.
Asked about the latter part of this quote in an interview, Coetzee said:
There is no longer a left worth speaking of, and a language of the left. The language of politics, with its new economistic bent, is even more repellent than it was fifteen years ago
Views on South Africa
Along with André Brink and Breyten Breytenbach, Coetzee was, according to Fred Pfeil, at "the forefront of the anti-apartheid movement within Afrikaner literature and letters".
كان طليعيا في المعارضة من بين ابناء الجنس الابيض ضد ساسية الفصل العنصري
On accepting the Jerusalem Prize in 1987, Coetzee spoke of the limitations of art in South African society, whose structures had resulted in "deformed and stunted relations between human beings" and "a deformed and stunted inner life".
He went on to say that "South African literature is a literature in bondage. It is a less than fully human literature. It is exactly the kind of literature you would expect people to write from prison".
وصف الادب الجنوب افريقي بأنه الادب الذي تتوقع ان يكتبه الانسان من السجن
He called on the South African government to abandon its apartheid policy. Scholar Isidore Diala states that J. M. Coetzee, Nadine Gordimer and André Brink are "three of South Africa's most distinguished white writers, all with definite anti-apartheid commitment".
It has been argued that Coetzee's 1999 novel Disgrace allegorises South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Asked about his views on the TRC, Coetzee has stated: "In a state with no official religion, the TRC was somewhat anomalous: a court of a certain kind based to a large degree on Christian teaching and on a strand of Christian teaching accepted in their hearts by only a tiny proportion of the citizenry. Only the future will tell what the TRC managed to achieve".
Following his Australian citizenship ceremony, Coetzee said that "I did not so much leave South Africa, a country with which I retain strong emotional ties, but come to Australia. I came because from the time of my first visit in 1991, I was attracted by the free and generous spirit of the people, by the beauty of the land itself and – when I first saw Adelaide – by the grace of the city that I now have the honour of calling my home."[15] When he initially moved to Australia, he had cited the South African government's lax attitude to crime in that country as a reason for the move, leading to a spat with Thabo Mbeki, who, speaking of Coetzee's novel Disgrace stated that "South Africa is not only a place of rape".[19] In 1999, the African National Congress submission to an investigation into racism in the media by the South African Human Rights Commission named Disgrace as a novel exploiting racist stereotypes.[49] However, when Coetzee won his Nobel Prize, Mbeki congratulated him "on behalf of the South African nation and indeed the continent of Africa".[50]
Bibliography
Coetzee's published work consists of fiction, fictionalised autobiographies (which he terms "autrebiography"),[58] and non-fiction.
Fiction
· Dusklands (1974) ISBN 0-14-024177-9
· In the Heart of the Country (1977) ISBN 0-14-006228-9
· Waiting for the Barbarians (1980) ISBN 0-14-006110-X
· Life & Times of Michael K (1983) ISBN 0-14-007448-1
· Foe (1986) ISBN 0-14-009623-X
· Age of Iron (1990) ISBN 0-14-027565-7
· The Master of Petersburg (1994) ISBN 0-14-023810-7
· The Lives of Animals (1999) ISBN 0-691-07089-X
· Disgrace (1999) ISBN 978-0143115281
· Elizabeth Costello (2003) ISBN 0-670-03130-5
· Slow Man (2005) ISBN 0-670-03459-2
· Diary of a Bad Year (2007) ISBN 1-846-55120-X
Fictionalised autobiography
· Boyhood: Scenes from Provincial Life (1997) ISBN 0-14-026566-X
· Youth: Scenes from Provincial Life II (2002) ISBN 0-670-03102-X
· Summertime (2009) ISBN 1-846-55318-0
· Scenes from Provincial Life (2011) ISBN 1-846-55485-3. An edited single volume of Boyhood: Scenes from Provincial Life, Youth: Scenes from Provincial Life II, and Summertime.
However, Coetzee's solitude has not allowed him to go unnoticed in any way. His books have become worldwide bestsellers and he is the only author to have ever won the Booker Prize twice.