I'd like the like this book, because I like Coetzee very much... but this one doesn't do anything for me. I've tried to read it twice and haven't finished it either time

A thriller and bold meditation on art and politics. There’s something about this writing which feels like easeful mastery.

I agree with Jan Daley's assessment of this as 'more admirable than enjoyable'. Like other reviewers, I was surprised with Coetzee's departure in style from that of some of his other books. He really did try to enter into the gloominess and psychological angst of Dostoevsky's novels, and we're not left with the same immediacy that Coetzee's known for.

This book is basically a good attempt at what it would be like if Dostoevsky himself were to be found inside a Dostoevskian novel. It seemed to me to draw its themes and timbre primarily from 'Devils' and 'Crime and Punishment'.

Really incredible to know that Coetzee found the inspiration for Pavel's death from the death of his own son. Some of that intensity and anguish certainly comes through strongly. Tension runs throughout.

That said, it was not a particularly pleasurable read for me, and I thought some of his attempts (if that's what they were) to channel Dostoevsky's musings about God and fate etc. were a bit wide of the mark.

In my opinion, the Master is ultimately inimitable.

I'm teaching Coetzee's Summertime this semester so I thought instead of reading it three more times, I'd try instead to read some other novels by C. This one is kind of mediocre, but I kind of wanted that, to see what he's like away from the more celebrated novels.

In this one, Coetzee takes on the persona of Dostoyevsky on a weird but nonetheless biographically real trip back to Petersburg, to settle accounts after the death of his step-son. I think there are probably a couple interesting ways to approach the book: one would be to investigate the workings of state power, which are suitably veiled and dangerous-- the same goes for the character of Nechaez, who is out of power but would be just as arbitrary as the Russian police if he were in power.

Another way, and this might be best, is to consider D as a stand-in for C, where both writers have certain inchoate (and I don't mean that in a bad way) political desires and who feel some frustration, or fear of reprisal, for trying to act out ideas that seem dis-consonant (sounds better than dissonant, to me) to the general mood of the people.

A third approach, maybe, is sexuality-- what kind of women is D/C drawn to, and this, in light of the similar question in Summertime, is at once interesting and a little icky.

As interesting as these questions are, they are kind of swaddled in this intense self-consciousness and the almost mystical visions D has here. I think it's an interesting experiment on C's part, a kind of puppet show. But by the same token, I think he's a much clearer thinker than D is, and D a more passionate feeler of things; the hybrid of the two of them isn't quite a successful creation-- the noise is turned up, but it kind of obscures the signal.

In Age of Iron we got the story of a soul. Here we get the soul of a story. We get to the heart of it. How is a story created, from what painful depths does it come? Perhaps a bit like Petersburg itself, out of the mud and "mosquito-ridden marsh" [1]; from scratch, violently, unjustly (as is history's wont), the wolves at your heels? Or could it be that a story isn't created in the same way an object or a city is created. Could it be that stories are what the world are, what reality is? There is no difference between Art and Life, Truth and Fiction. It is the stuff we are made of. And, just in case we needed reminding (and we do, based on what I read): "Stories can be about other people: you are not obliged to find a place for yourself in them." (page 184).


[1] A Window on Europe

Very feverish novel about, and completely in the line of the Russian writer Dostoevsky. Coetzee evokes a secret visit of the 49-year-old Dostoyevsky to Saint-Petersburg, after the death of his stepson Pavel. It is not clear to me what Coetzee had in view with this book: a tribute to the genius of Dostoyevsky (and at the same time, a portrait of his despair)? An attempt to dig even deeper into the human soul than the Russian grand master had already done? An exploration of the manipulation techniques that revolutionaries (here in the person of Nechaev) apply to other people, from their ideological glare? Or is it a therapeutic book, written after the death of Coetzee's own son? I fear that I do not know, but most probably it is all this at once. That makes it a very rich book, but I have to admit that I don't quite find it a real succes, being a bit too hermetically. Any way, it is a very atypical Coetzee, at least, very different from his earlier work.

What is it with people digging up poor Dostoyevsky and reimagining him in his final days, where everything has fallen apart and he feels he has left his genius far behind. First we had Summer in Baden Baden, and now Coetzee is using his particular Middle Aged Man in a Crisis style to do the same thing. Instead of his final, gambling infused summer, this reimagines his trip to St Petersburg, home of his beloved but distant stepson, who has died a mysterious death, perhaps at the hands of the State. I have no idea how much of this is true - not much according to Wikipedia, but I am no Russian scholar. What we have though is Dostoyevsky as a vehicle for usual Coetzee fayre - infidelity, crises, thinking a bit too much about stuff, whilst getting involved with some shady characters on the side. It was alright, I suppose. I hope I don't have too much more Coetzee to go though.