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.