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Moral Thinker and Mythmaker |
| Section: BOOK WORLD / COMMENTARY |
| Author: Judith Chettle |
| Publication:
The World & I Online |
| Issue Date: 2/1/2004 |
| Size: 3,071 Words, 18,326 Characters |
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Writers tell stories; that is their function. The stories may be about people, places, and ideas, or sometimes all three. Those stories, if they are well told and perceptive, also reveal fundamental truths about the societies in which they live. And for more than four decades,
South African writers had one all-encompassing story to tell: the story of apartheid. During the apartheid years, writing was inevitably for South African writers a political act. They could not ignore a notorious system and produce comedies of manners or family sagas, the sorts of books that could be written in happier countries. Instead, the books they were expected to, and did, write were as much vehicles for protest and witness as demonstrations in the streets or acts of sabotage.
The ruling Nationalist government took them seriously, regarding their works as threats to the country's security. It banned their books (Nadine Gordimer), took away their passports (Alan Paton), and imprisoned some (Breyten Breytenbach). Outsiders, though, were free to read their novels and to learn from these lightly fictionalized but always vivid accounts of what was actually happening in the country during those years.
Though often cited in the media as being an antiapartheid writer, J.M. Coetzee, the 2003 winner of the Nobel Prize in literature, is the rare South African author of those years whose books explored wider themes. A writer in the high European tradition of ideas, he has sought to reflect the complexities of the workings of that most capricious of organs, the human heart, when it is suddenly forced to confront disaster. These disasters--a shipwreck in Foe, the charge of sexual harassment in Disgrace, and an unexpected death in The Master of Petersburg--are not necessarily political in origin. Whatever their cause, they prop...
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...e other Coetzee protagonists, Elizabeth Costello finds strength to fight back.
While it is not his best book, Elizabeth Costello is rich in ideas, bracingly provocative, and, as usual, impressively original. It is the work of a major writer, a Nobel winner, indeed. J.M. Coetzee continues to write with a distinctive and original voice, despite the somewhat rigid form his latest novel takes.
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Publication Details
(The World & I Online) |
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The World & I Online is a
comprehensive academic resource that encompasses a broad range of
articles by scholars and experts in the areas of Global Studies,
Liberal Arts, Fine & Applied Arts, General Science, and Spanish.
Originally published monthly in print as The World & I, our site
includes the complete contents since 1986 and continues to publish
a new issue online each month. |
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