The Ubud Writers & Readers Festival presents
Nobel Laureate J.M. Coetzee in 2009?
by Renee Thorpe
Nobel Laureate for Literature, James Marshall Coetzee, better known as J.M. Coetzee, is one of this year’s festival headliners, so mark your calendars.
Cape Town native, now an Australian citizen, Coetzee first garnered international accolades for Waiting for the Barbarians, in 1980, and his 1983 novel Live and Times of Michael K won him the Booker Prize. Foe, his novel about Robinson Crusoe and Friday exalted Coetzee to master of postmodernity. University courses on postmodern literature often brought students to this work that fosters critical examination of language and literature as regards gender, authorship, and ownership.
Now, poised to reach even larger audiences with the film adaptation of his second Booker Prize winning novel Disgrace (2005), J. M. Coetzee enjoys renewed interest as a post Apartheid voice. Coetzee will likely promote his 2007 novel, Diary of a Bad Year, but it helps to get familiar with a writer’s most successful works. Many of Coetzee’s critics and fans find Disgrace his most approachable novel, a good introduction to the author’s voice.
Although set in contemporary South Africa, its citizens jockeying for positions in the nation’s wide open future, Disgrace’s themes could be transposed to any number of post colonial or post dictatorial countries.
In Disgrace, the protagonist is David Lurie, a divorced college professor and scholar of Romantic English poets. The reader discovers Lurie going through the motions of teaching communications to his equally detached students.
Although pretending to himself that he is enriched by his various relations with women, Professor Lurie is treating them as little more than sex objects for his own physical gratification. Inept at human associations, egotistical and in contempt of his colleagues, his actions lead him to scandal and an ultimate disgrace which he refuses to recognize. Will this guy ever learn, the reader wonders?
Coetzee offers a bit of hope in this caper. Lurie’s one semi-meaningful connection is his daughter Lucy who lives in the rural east Cape. He goes there to get a change of scene and to work on his chamber opera about the poet Byron. He ends up helping on the farm and in a veterinary clinic, taking to country toil without actually admitting penance. But a horrific event threatens Lucy’s way of life and challenges Lurie to confront fatherhood, ethics, and the future of South Africa itself.
Disgrace is a captivating page-turner, constructed with taut precision and such perfectly restrained language that each chapter invites the reader to draw possibilities and virtually contribute to the story.
For all of Disgrace’s characters’ revenge, lessons, decisions, and solutions, there is little reward shown. It is a dark novel, but not without irony and beauty. The lowliest creatures are described with breathtaking care and tenderness. Coetzee does shed grace on dogs, ducks, and an ugly little old woman.
Disgrace raises issues far larger than post-Apartheid South Africa. The story addresses politics, racism, and sexism, but there are so many levels woven into the text that some readers may inevitably think very differently about Indonesia, life in an emerging economy, the struggle of native versus visitor, or about the power of sex. In a way, this novel is Coetzee’s Year of Living Dangerously.
In 2008, Director Steve Jacobs cast John Malkovich in the lead role, and the film is said to be very faithful to the text. A recent hit at the Toronto International Film Festival, it may not yet be available at the local video outlet. But this reviewer wagers that festival founder and well-connected hostess Janet deNeefe will figure out a way to get it screened.
Meantime, plan to stay in Bali for the October festival. J M Coetzee will be illuminating his many extraordinary works in a number of sessions at the 2009 Ubud Writers & Readers Festival.
