J. M. Coetzee

"Coetzee," says the writer Rian Malan, "is a man of almost monkish self-discipline and dedication. He does not drink, smoke or eat meat. He cycles vast distances to keep fit and spends at least an hour at his writing-desk each morning, seven days a week. A colleague who has worked with him for more than a decade claims to have seen him laugh just once. An acquaintance has attended several dinner parties where Coetzee has uttered not a single word."

New Statesman, October 25, 1999

Comments

[Eva Malm]

From `Diary of a Bad Year´
page 53: `The current hysteria about sexual acxts with children...´
page 56: `The new orthodoxy would seem to be that what renders the image culpal is not the idear of sex between minors (many of whom lead active and even indiscriminate sex lifes)nor the fact of sex, real or simulated, between actors who are minors, but the presence of an adult eye somewhere in the scene, either behind the camera or in the darkend auditorium.´
Here the author becomes the man with an adult eye in the darkend auditorium. ush

[Eva Malm]

From `Disgrace´page 24:`Not now she sais..´
`Not rape, not quite that, but undesired never the less, undesired to the core.´
Well,that was a different definition from most counties laws: they say when a girl sais no, then it is a rape.
While discussing this with his lesbian daughter later in the book, the daughter sais, but if you love her, you could get married. Then the main carracter, sais, no he did not love her.
Her the reader meets a cold harted man.

[Lennart Frimodig]

Malan´s description is funny. Strong introverts functions like that.

For me, Coetzee belongs to my kind of people. Colin Wilson wrote a whole book about our kind, The Outsider. It is not a chosen position, it is something forced on you. A position that you, hopefully, gradually learn to handle. I eat meat when I feel like it, but I prefer fish. I have little respect for environment people, they generally seems guite dumb, and unscientific, they are true believers. True believers are allways wrong.

There is a scene in Boyhood that I really like: the hero is sitting in the kitchen and the mother is making something at the stove. And she shots a glance at him, and he understands that she has seen all trough him, but she will keep quiet, because she is his mother. I had exactly that feeling, a number of times.

Strong introverts don´t like parties, it puts very heavy demands on us. Since I was 28, and had to visit parties for political reasons, I have never been to a party. Parties are for normal people.