J. M. Coetzee - Inner Workings: Literary Essays, 2000-2005

J. M. Coetzee - Inner Workings: Literary Essays, 2000-2005 (Vintage, 2008).

ISBN: 9780099506140 | 320 pages | EPUB


In addition to being one of the most acclaimed and accomplished fiction writers in the world, Nobel laureate J. M. Coetzee is also a literary critic of the highest caliber. INNER WORKINGS gathers together his literary essays from 2000 to 2005.

Of the writers discussed in the first half of the book, several -- Italo Svevo, Joseph Roth, Bruno Schulz, Sandor Marai -- lived through the Austro-Hungarian fin de siècle and felt the influence of Schopenhauer, Nietzsche and Freud. Coetzee further explores the work of six of twentieth-century German literature's greatest writers: Robert Musil, Robert Walser, Walter Benjamin (the Arcades Project), Joseph Roth, Gunter Grass, W.G. Sebald, and the poet Paul Celan in his "wrestlings with the German language". There is an essay on Graham Greene's "Brighton Rock" and on the short fiction of Samuel Beckett, a writer whom Coetzee has long admired. American literature is strongly represented from Walt Whitman, through William Faulkner, Saul Bellow and Arthur Miller to Philip Roth. Coetzee rounds off the collection with essays on three fellow Nobel laureates: Nadine Gordimer, Gabriel García Márquez and V. S. Naipaul.

Brilliantly insightful, challenging, yet accessible, these essays demonstrate Coetzee's sharp eye and unwavering critical acumen and will be of interest to his many fans as well as to all readers of international literature.


Reviews

"Coetzee the critic is every bit as good as Coetzee the novelist." -- Irish Times

"Coetzee writes well about the technicalities of literature: like an engineer he dismantles the texts and suggests ways in which they might run more efficiently." -- Scotland on Sunday

"The essays here are welcoming, informative, readable, lucid, plain, purged of jargon. . . Coetzee is a critic of unbiddable integrity" -- Daily Telegraph

"Literary criticism of the highest order." -- Independent

"Fans will relish his precise, restrained style of literary criticism . . . communicating Coetzee's passion for literature." -- New Statesman

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