April 10, 2009

Books

Antiphonal Fiction

Diary of a Bad YearJ. M. CoetzeeViking Penguin, $24.99, 231 pp.

Edward T. Wheeler

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 (...)


 

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