Late Essays: 2006-2017

by J. M. Coetzee

Overview

A new collection of twenty-three literary essays from the Nobel Prize–winning author. J. M. Coetzee’s latest novel, The Schooldays of Jesus, is now available from Viking.

J. M. Coetzee is not only one of the most acclaimed fiction writers in the world, he is also an accomplished and insightful literary critic. In Late Essays: 2006–2016, a thought-provoking collection of twenty-three pieces, he examines the work of some of the world’s greatest writers, from Daniel Defoe in the early eighteenth century to Goethe and Irène Némirovsky to Coetzee’s contemporary Philip Roth. Challenging yet accessible, literary master Coetzee writes these essays with great clarity and precision, offering readers an illuminating and wise analysis of a remarkable list of works of international literature that span three centuries.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780735223929
Publisher:	Penguin Publishing Group
Publication date:	12/03/2019
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	304
Sales rank:	1,087,418
Product dimensions:	5.10(w) x 7.70(h) x 0.80(d)

About the Author

J. M. Coetzee won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2003 and is the author of twenty-two books, which have been translated into many languages. He was the first author to twice win the Booker Prize. A native of South Africa, he now lives in Adelaide, Australia.

Hometown:

Adelaide, Australia

Date of Birth:

February 9, 1940

Place of Birth:

Cape Town, South Africa

Education:

B.A., University of Cape Town, 1960; M.A., 1963; Ph.D. in Literature, University of Texas, Austin, 1969

Editorial Reviews

Coetzee is as perspicacious and erudite a guide as on could hope for. His biographical sketches of the life and times of the authors he addresses are excellent, concretely informative while also marbled with interesting tidbits . . . What can’t be found anywhere else, where Coetzee is unparalleled, is his ability to capture the psychology of individual characters, to lay bare the inner working of their minds, and in doing so bring to light the source of their enduring interest to readers.”—New York Times Book Review

“Coetzee’s many strong and provocative essays, along with the clarity of his writing and the literary biographies he weaves into his analyses, make this in general a worthwhile work of literary criticism.”—Publishers Weekly

"Coetzee again demonstrates his range and precision as a literary critic and his gift for rendering challenging material accessible."—Booklist (starred)

"As pages turn, one becomes increasingly drawn in by Coetzee’s insights–subtly interconnected, ever elucidating.”—BookPage

“With wondering intelligence and a deep understanding of history, Nobel Laureate J.M. Coetzee (Disgrace) tackles literary classics and lesser-known works in Late Essays . . . By focusing the mysterious inspirations of so many luminary authors, Coetzee has made his Late Essays into a vibrant and inquisitive work of literary criticism.”—Shelf Awareness

“His critiques are constructive and instructive. Above all they do what all good literary essays should do: They encourage us to read and reread, to appreciate anew and newly discover.”—The Weekly Standard

"Coetzee is unparalleled in his ability to penetrate the philosophical and psychological mysteries in a work of art. This will appeal to scholars and readers of serious fiction."—Library Journal

“Nobel and Booker Prize winner Coetzee (The Schooldays of Jesus, 2017, etc.) offers another collection of reflective and erudite essays on a variety of poets and novelists . . . Thought-provoking essays that offer more than mere opinion, as the author plumbs the writers' philosophical and psychological depths.”—Kirkus Review

Praise for J. M. Coetzee

‟Coetzee is that rare breed, an academic who is also a world-class writer, and this latest collection is informed as much by the novelist’s keen eye as it is by the theorists obsessions.” —The New York Times Book Review

‟[Coetzee] is probably the only Nobel laureate to write so extensively about his peers . . . and he is happily unrestrained by mere collegiality.” —New York Sun

From the Publisher

…Coetzee is as perspicacious and erudite a guide as one could hope for. His biographical sketches of the life and times of the authors he addresses are excellent, concretely informative while also marbled with interesting tidbits…But the meat of Coetzee's overviews can be found in other good introductions by other critics. What can't be found anywhere else, where Coetzee is unparalleled, is his ability to capture the psychology of individual characters, to lay bare the inner working of their minds, and in so doing bring to light the source of their enduring interest to readers…Late Essays is filled with many moments of…perfect insight, moments when the reader is left enthralled by Coetzee's powers of perception…In these essays, Coetzee is doing for the writers who came before him what I imagine he hopes will be done for him by the writers who will follow. He is gravedigging, with probity, with the greatest reverence for the craft they share, and in this way is saying thank you in the only way one writer can really say it to another, which is by writing about them well.

The New York Times Book Review - Benjamin Ogden

10/30/2017
In this collection of 23 essays, Coetzee (The Schooldays of Jesus) offers striking, imaginative insights into a varied group of writers, from German poet Friedrich Hölderlin (1770–1843) to modern-day master Philip Roth. Coetzee’s entries, roving from Johann Wolfgang von Goethe to Leo Tolstoy, Samuel Beckett, and Patrick White, raise numerous questions: Why do novels lie to us? What makes Samuel Beckett like Herman Melville? How do translators make choices? In his essay on playwright and fiction writer Heinrich von Kleist, Coetzee reflects on the author’s enigmatic novella The Marquise of O, asking whether there can be aspects of a story that remain unknown even to the author. Yet there are limits to Coetzee’s scope: the authors in this collection are, except for Irene Nemirovsky, male. Moreover, Coetzee reveals a blindness to the female experience, as made apparent when he writes, about the heroine of Daniel Defoe’s Roxana: A Fortunate Mistress, that anything “resistible” isn’t rape and questions how she could be sexually alluring at 50. Nevertheless, Coetzee’s many strong and provocative essays, along with the clarity of his writing and the literary biographies he weaves into his analyses, make this in general a worthwhile work of literary criticism. Agent: Peter Lampack, Peter Lampack Agency. (Jan.)

Publishers Weekly

2017-10-17
Nobel and Booker Prize winner Coetzee (The Schooldays of Jesus, 2017, etc.) offers another collection of reflective and erudite essays on a variety of poets and novelists.Originally published as introductions to foreign translations or in the New York Review of Books, some of the author's favorites recur: Daniel Defoe, Robert Walser, Zbigniew Herbert, Philip Roth, and Samuel Beckett, the "philosophical satirist," whom Coetzee covers in four of the essays. While discussing Beckett's letters and two novels—Watt, a "fable cum treatise that for long stretches manages to be hypnotically fascinating," and Molloy, a "mysterious work, inviting interpretation and resisting it at the same time"—the author focuses on Beckett's language, a "self-enclosed system, a labyrinth without issue, in which human beings are trapped." An acclaimed translator himself, Coetzee is particularly interested in the translations of some authors' works. He laments that any translation of Goethe's The Sorrows of Young Werther that would be "true" for readers of the 1770s as well as for today's is "an unattainable ideal." He quibbles that Michael Hamburger's translations of Friedrich Hölderlin's poetry are "only intermittently…touched with divine fire." But the "achievement is nevertheless considerable." The essay on Patrick White, the "greatest writer Australia has produced," confronts the dilemma faced by literary executors. Coetzee praises White's agent Barbara Mobbs as well as Kafka's friend Max Brod for refusing to carry out their authors' wishes to have their writings destroyed. As Coetzee writes, "the world is a richer place now that we have [White's] The Hanging Garden." As a longtime advocate for animal rights, his short piece on Juan Ramón Jiménez's tale of a donkey, Platero and I, is especially poignant. Other subjects of Coetzee's probing eye include Flaubert, Tolstoy, Hawthorne, Heinrich Von Kleist, Antonio Di Benedetto, Les Murray, Gerald Murnane, Irène Némirovsky, Ford Madox Ford, and Hendrik Witbooi.Thought-provoking essays that offer more than mere opinion, as the author plumbs the writers' philosophical and psychological depths.

Kirkus Reviews