J. M. Coetzee

John Maxwell Coetzee
(source: Adelaide News)
no copyright infringement intended

Born in Cape Town, moving through the years across most of the English speaking part of the world, in Worcester, London, Bracknell, Austin, Buffalo, again in Cape Town, eventually settled in Adelaide; computer programmer for IBM and ICT sometime in the 1960's; Nobel Prize in Literature in 2003; inarguably the most celebrated and decorated living English-language author (Richard Poplak in Daily Maverick); for Isidore Diala, these are three of South Africa's most distinguished white writers, all with definite anti-apartheid commitment: Coetzee, Nadine Gordimer and André Brink ; in some of his books blending fiction with elements of fictionalized autobiography; politically siding on the left without being part of the left (because, there is no longer a left worth speaking of, and a language of the left); involved in the anti-Vietnam War protests from the end of the 1960's; vocal critic of animal cruelty and advocating the animal rights, criticizing the contemporary anti-terrorism laws due to his commitment for democracy and human rights.

(source: wiki)

Julia Alvarez considers mandatory to read him in your forties, as it would resonate best to your experience and all; then how would it be in my seventies (Coetzee is now seventy five, by the way); I started to read his Foe.

• The Five Most Important Books for Julia

(A Life in Books)

The Five Most Important Books for Julia

(source: La Bloga)
no copyright infringement intended

Julia Alvarez, novelist, essayist and poet, born in New York City, raised in the Dominican Republic, living now alternatively in both places: her books (A Cafecito Story, Once Upon A Quinceañera: Coming of Age in the U.S.A, The Woman I kept to Myself, among others) speak about this double identity. Other books by her ( A Gift of Gracias: The Legend of Altagracia, for instance) are written for children.

Julia Alvarez gives in Newsweek her Top of Five Books. She takes an interesting approach: one book for each decade of life. Here they are:

1. Childhood: The Arabian Nights. The heroine was a brown, feisty girl who saved all the women in her kingdom with stories.

2. Teens: Leaves of Grass. Behold El Señor Whitman, a Latino-sounding fellow with his long rhetorical lines.

3. Twenties: The Woman Warrior by Maxine Hong Kingston. A beautiful, lyrical memoir about coming from somewhere else and reinventing yourself, while still bearing the burden of the past.

4. Thirties: Middlemarch by George Eliot. Writing in the 1870s, Eliot had more to say to us than the hotshots of the 1980s.

5. Forties: Disgrace by J. M. Coetzee. An intense and sparse novel about how we become human after our world falls apart.

And Four Quartets by T.S. Eliot is a book that she always returns too: a long, mystical poem that reboots her spirit. You remember that this is also one of the Top-Five for Diane Ackerman (poems about time, impermanence and the glory of everyday life).

Splendid! This is really a life in books!


(A Life in Books)

(J. M. Coetzee)