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Letter to the editor

The literary ambassador

J.M. Coetzee takes seriously his role as critic, shedding light on works from all over the world.

By John Freeman, Special to the Times
Published December 30, 2007

In his 1997 memoir Boyhood, South African-born Nobel laureate J.M. Coetzee recalled the desperate passion with which he devoured books as a child. "He knows that if he wants to be a great man he ought to be reading serious books," he wrote. "He promises himself he will soon begin serious reading; but for the present all he wants are stories." - The younger Coetzee had no reason to fret over these early habits. In three decades of publishing, the older Coetzee has established himself as a great writer as well as a serious reader. The New York Review of Books often airdrops him into the oeuvres of European writers such as Robert Musil, Franz Kafka or Paul Celan as if he were some sort of secret critical commando.

Inner Workings, Coetzee's second compilation of pieces from the New York Review, showcases just how well - and how seriously - he performs this role. Among his earliest published works are translations from Dutch and Afrikaans poets, and he has retained a translator's forensic appreciation for the nuances of language, an almost scriptural regard for the primacy and abiding mystery of an author's intentions.

This may sound like abstruse criteria for a critic to possess, but with the death of Susan Sontag the United States lost one of its most vocal, globally turned klieg lights on international literature. It is also worth noting that a minuscule 3 percent of books published in this country come from other cultures. With Inner Workings, Coetzee shows he is more than capable of filling the ambassadorial role, although the voices he spotlights are different.

While Sontag was a discoverer, Coetzee appears happier as a kind of archaeologist of the recent classics. All of the works he addresses in Inner Workings have passed what he and William Gass would call the test of time, but not without the traces of human intervention. The hands of translators, spotty scholarship and overweening biographers are upon them everywhere.

The essays in Inner Workings are often correctives, then, to what Coetzee perceives as misinterpreting lenses. In a tremendous piece on Faulkner, he scolds all three of the novelist's major biographers for psychological overreaching.

There is a small competitive irony in this, as Coetzee begins many of his essays with long biographical asides about each subject, often drawn from work not available in English. As capsule life studies, these can be illuminating, especially as so many of the writers he studies had miserable, difficult or dislocated lives.

As a critic, Coetzee is a sharpener, not a demolisher, and these details serve as silent reminders of the difficulties - spiritual, political and otherwise - of making art. Not surprisingly, then, Coetzee often resorts to the passive voice or convoluted turns of phrase. In an essay on V.S. Naipaul's recent novel Half a Life, he remarks that the book "does not give the impression of being carefully worked on, and the technical weaknesses that result are not negligible."

A similar criticism could be applied, more gently, to these essays. With a few exceptions, they fall into a predictable structural formula; a few provide too much plot summary. And for all their astute observations, it's hard not to wish Coetzee allowed himself a respite of joy amid so many thousand pages of reading.

Perhaps, as Boyhood suggests, Coetzee decided long ago that such simple pleasures were for children. If that is the case, Inner Workings is not without its uses. In its own fiercely analytic way, it will change the way you see some of these writers - and in the long run, the only one that counts, that is not negligible.

John Freeman is president of the National Book Critics Circle.

Inner Workings: Essays 2000-2005

By J.M.Coetzee

Viking, 304 pages, $25.95

[Last modified December 26, 2007, 17:05:42]