From the obituary of David Coetzee, brother of JM Coetzee in The Guardian, 26 March 2010. It’s clear from the photograph that there was a strong family resemblance – though softer around the edges, less austere.

Born in 1943, Coetzee left his native South Africa in the mid-1960s after studying African government and law under the radical academic Jack Simons at the University of Cape Town and a brief stint as a wool trader. Paying his way across Europe by teaching English in Greece and sub-editing on trade papers in north London, he campaigned for the anti-apartheid cause in his spare time. In 1979, Coetzee had his first son Sam with his partner, Irene Fick. After working on other diaspora publications in London, Coetzee co-founded Africa Now with veteran Nigerian journalist Peter Enahoro, building up a network of energetic correspondents across the continent and investigating political corruption, human rights abuses and the excesses of Western corporations.

That editorial menu eventually proved too indigestible for Africa Now’s financiers and Coetzee left. In 1986, he launched Southscan, an insider newsletter on Southern African politics, just as the Nationalist regime in South Africa launched its second state of emergency. Well ahead of its technological time, Southscan equipped its reporters in the townships with modems with which they evaded the state censors to relay accounts of the heightening repression.

After Nelson Mandela’s release on 11 February 1990, Coetzee made lengthy forays back to South Africa, then took a further degree at London’s School of Oriental and African Studies before moving to Washington DC with his Nigerian wife, the journalist and broadcaster, Akwe Amosu, and their son Corin. There he stayed, apart from a two-year interregnum in Addis Ababa, publishing Southscan and writing a book on President Thabo Mbeki’s Africa policy, which he recently finished revising. He remained close to his writer brother John, whom he saw earlier this year. Coetzee died at home with his family.

From the recent Michel Houellebecq interview in The Paris Review. Interesting and disillusioned, as one would expect.

INTERVIEWER
What about marriage?

HOUELLEBECQ
I think that there is a sharp contrast for most people between life at university, where they meet lots of people, and the moment when they enter the workforce, when they basically no longer meet anyone. Life becomes dull. So as a result people get married to have a personal life. I could elaborate but I think everyone understands.

INTERVIEWER
So marriage is just a reaction to . . .

HOUELLEBECQ
To a largely solitary life.

There was a line I really liked in a novel by Coetzee. One of the characters suspects that the only thing that really interests his lesbian daughter in life is prickly-pear jam. Lesbianism is a pretext. She and her partner don’t have sex anymore, they dedicate themselves to decoration and cooking.

Maybe there’s some potential truth there about women who, in the end, have always been more interested in jam and curtains.

INTERVIEWER

And men? What do you think interests them?

HOUELLEBECQ

Little asses. I like Coetzee. He says things brutally, too.

What do you think is the appeal of your work, in spite of its brutality?

HOUELLEBECQ
There are too many answers. The first is that it’s well written. Another is that you sense obscurely that it’s the truth. Then there’s a third one, which is my favorite: because it’s intense. There is a need for intensity. From time to time, you have to forsake harmony. You even have to forsake truth. You have to, when you need to, energetically embrace excessive things. Now I sound like Saint Paul.

INTERVIEWER
What do you mean?

HOUELLEBECQ
“Now abideth faith, hope, charity, these three; but the greatest of these is charity.” For me the sentence would be “Now abideth beauty, truth, and intensity; but the greatest of these is intensity.”

From The New York Times:

One of the things he looks at, which other people including myself lack the courage to look at, is human cruelty and insensitivity as it occurs in all sort of contexts. If you read his work, it’s really a surgical, clinical diagnosis of what’s going on here, and it’s not pretty. On the other hand, he has an amazing human passion that is very clear even when he’s describing the worst things people do to one another. He’s asking what are the conditions of our salvation and damnation.

Jonathan Lear, on JM Coetzee

‘Disgrace’: A disquieting lens on South African brutality – International Herald Tribune

Coetzee has praised the film, saying, “Steve Jacobs has succeeded beautifully in integrating the story into the grand landscape of South Africa. The leading actors give strong and thoughtful performances.”

External reviews of the Disgrace @ IMDB.COM

What would the pre-accident Paul Rayment have brought to mind, listening to blues on the radio? He seems to have retired before the accident. There is no mention of inquiries from colleagues or winding up the business – no back story. We are told about the wrestler-like girl who fell in love with him, but we’re not really told how long ago that happened. He was still married, but nothing else. So, he sold up and made a tidy sum? Something like that. The apprenticeship in France, the weekend cycling tours. We have no real indication of what his life before the accident was like.

He’s like David Lurie and unlike him. Less frustration, less ambition, perhaps – less engagement? Older, less bitter – but the same coldness. He claims to be dog friendly as a lover, but we are told that this is likely a consequence of not really engaging with the individuality of the women he seduces.

SLOW MAN is the tale of an introverted man coping with the loss of a leg and the emotional journey back to some kind of equilibrium. The unsatisfactory nurses followed by the exceptional qualities of Marijana. Not a saint, but a sturdy, earthy woman who instinctively connects with him as a man rather than as a patient.

Equilibrium and the elements needed to produce it in a human life. The degree of individual variation – Peter Sellars and Keyser Sozay [I'm thinking of the scene where he kills his wife and children, rather than submit to the Hungarian gang who are out to get him].

Paul Rayment? He’s has become someone who is pretty self-contained and cat-like. More so than Elizabeth Costello, it turns out. One of the book’s saddest episodes is his considered rejection of a companionable domesticity with her. Nor will he pursue a connection with the blind Marianna; he’s truly smitten. He recognises that companionship is less than love and he won’t settle for less.

Love is the central theme – the hinterland between romantic love and the care and warmth offered by a nurse. That and what can be done with a life blighted by handicap. Rayment is not someone who has invested deeply in the lives of others. In his despair he fastens on the unsuitable Marijuana and, through her, the other Dokics.

Elizabeth Costello’s motivations are opaque, but one thing is clear: she pushes Rayment to see what he’s doing – its impact on him and its impact on all of them, not least Marijana’s husband, Mel.

Drago is the son Rayment never had – Marijana the nurturing mother he lacked as a child. Things don’t work out in the end, but there can be no doubting that Rayment has made progress. Just as Lurie must lose his looks and prestige before he can truly empathise and behave humanely, Rayment has to face up to his needs and desires for closeness and how this can change both his life and the lives of others. He comes to see that his real, imperfect connection with the Dokics is worth much more than any bequest to a museum could be. I suspect this is a lesson Coetzee feels he needs to keep relearning. From the reviews of his memoir of young adulthood, YOUTH, I gather that he sees himself as a cold fish – selfish and aloof. Maybe the recurring theme of dogginess is a kind of loathing for cat-like qualities he sees in himself?

One conjecture I feel confident in making: Coetzee sees himself as a slow man. Slow to learn the lessons he teaches his protagonists.

UK IT RU US FR DE

Interesting to see the different themes targeted by the jacket designers in the UK, Italy and Russia, the US, France and Germany.

I think I like the British version best – the no-frills work/prison shirt patched and stained is a good metaphor for what happens to the book’s protagonist – especially when one remembers that he’s called Rayment.

The