The South African writer and Nobel laureate J. M. Coetzee made his name in the 1980s with Waiting for the Barbarians and The Life and Times of Michael K, darkly elliptical fables that answered the oppressions of apartheid with a grim and comfortless intensity. Coetzee’s fiction typically sets global issues against tight personal dramas of loss, desire, disgrace, and aging, an (...)
April 10, 2009
Books
Antiphonal Fiction
Diary of a Bad YearJ. M. CoetzeeViking Penguin, $24.99, 231 pp.
The remainder of this article is only available to paid subscribers. If you’re not currently a Commonweal subscriber in print or online, an online-only subscription costs just $34 a year. Click here for immediate access.


