From Publishers WeeklyHarsh, unflinching and powerful, Coetzee's (Waiting for the Barbarians) new novel is a cry of moral outrage at the legacy that apartheid has created in South Africa. In scenes of stunning ferocity, he depicts the unequal warfare waging between the two races, a conflict in which the balance of power is slowly shifting. An elderly woman's letters to her daughter in America make up the narrative. Near death from rapidly advancing cancer, Cape Town resident Mrs. Curren is a retired university professor and political liberal who has always considered herself a "good person" in deploring ...
A los cincuenta y dos a?os, David Lurie tiene poco de lo que enorgullecerse. Con dos divorcios a sus espaldas, apaciguar el deseo es su ?nica aspiraci?n, sus clases en la universidad son un mero tr?mite para ?l y para los estudiantes. Cuando se destapa su relaci?n con una alumna, David, en un acto de soberbia, preferir? renunciar a su puesto antes que disculparse en p?blico. Rechazado por todos, abandona Ciudad del Cabo y va a visitar la granja de su hija Lucy. All?, en una sociedad donde los c?digos de comportamiento, sean de blancos o de negros, han cambiado, donde el idioma es una herramienta viciada que no sirve a este mundo naciente, David ver? hacerse a?icos todas sus creencias en una tarde de violencia implacable. Una historia profunda, extraordinaria, que por momentos atenaza el coraz?n, y siempre, hasta el final, subyuga.
Este es otro de los libros traducidos al castellano del escritor sudafricano. En 1869 un novelista ruso exiliado vuelve a St. Petersburgo para recoger los efectos personales de su hijastro muerto. El novelista se ve envuelto en un mundo de sospechas revoluci?n y peligro cuando descubre que la polic?a zarista ha descubierto entre sus enseres ciertos papeles incriminatorios. En este libro de alto contenido psicol?gico, Coetzee recrea la mente de Feodor Dostoievski (autor de "Crimen y castigo" y "Los hermanos Karamazov"). El gran novelista est? obsesionado con descubrir si la muerte de su hijastro fue un asesinato o un suicidio, encontr?ndose sumergido en la subcultura violenta revolucionaria de la Rusia de 1869. Lo que Coetzee nos muestra es un retrato psicol?gico entremezclado con la trama t?pica de un Thriller.
Elizabeth Costello es una reconocida novelista australiana cuya dilatada vida se nos revela a trav?s de una ingeniosa serie de ocho conferencias. Desde el discurso de aceptaci?n de un premio en una facultad de letras de Nueva Inglaterra, una conferencia sobre el mal celebrada en Amsterdam hasta una lectura del poeta Robert Duncan plena de alusiones sexuales, Coetzee conduce al lector inexorablemente hacia un final que, como es habitual en este autor, nos impulsa a la reflexi?n m?s profunda. Fruto de una imaginaci?n v?vida y escrita en una prosa certera, Elizabeth Costello es, en apariencia, la historia de una mujer en su faceta de madre, hermana, amante y escritora. Pero es tambi?n una profunda y cautivadora meditaci?n sobre la esencia de narrar historias, y una defensa de la necesidad de ponerse en lugar del otro para entender que la humanidad es una sola. Solo un escritor de la talla de Coetzee puede llevar a cabo dicha tarea.
In an act of breathtaking imagination, J. M. Coetzee radically reinvents the story of Robinson Crusoe.In the early eighteenth century, Susan Barton finds herself set adrift from a mutinous ship and cast ashore on a remote desert island. There she finds shelter with its only other inhabitants: a man named Cruso and his tongueless slave, Friday. In time, she builds a life for herself as Cruso’s companion and, eventually, his lover. At last they are rescued by a passing ship, but only she and Friday survive the journey back to London. Determined to have her story ...
One of the two books that J. M. Coetzee won the Booker Prize for (he was also awarded the 2003 Nobel Prize for Literature), The Life and Times of Michael K. is the story of a simple man attempting to survive (from without) in a society that has seen its humanity perverted by war into horror. He is trying only to live in quiet absence and is senselessly thwarted at every turn. Like all of the rest of Coetzee's work, Life and Times is something more than shattering, more than moving.In a south Africa turned by war, Michael K. sets out to take his ailing mother back to her rural home. On the way there she dies, leaving him alone in an anarchic world of brutal roving armies. Imprisoned, Michael is unable to bear confinement and escapes, determined to live with dignity. This life affirming novel goes to the center of human experience-the need for an interior, spiritual life; for some connections to the world in which we live; and for purity of vision.
One day while cycling along the Magill road in Adelaide Paul Rayment is knocked down by a car, resulting in the amputation of his leg. Humiliated, he retreats to his flat and a succession of day-care nurses. After a series of carers who are either "unsuitable" or just temporary, he happens upon Marijana, with whom he has a European childhood in common: his in France, hers in Croatia. Marijana nurses him tactfully and efficiently, ministering to his new set of needs. His feelings for her soon become deeper and more complex. He attempts to fund her son Drago's passage ...
The idea of human cruelty to animals so consumes novelist Elizabeth Costello in her later years that she can no longer look another person in the eye: humans, especially meat-eating ones, seem to her to be conspirators in a crime of stupefying magnitude taking place on farms and in slaughterhouses, factories, and laboratories across the world.Costello’s son, a physics professor, admires her literary achievements, but dreads his mother’s lecturing on animal rights at the college where he teaches. His colleagues resist her argument that human reason is overrated and that the inability to reason does ...
"[A] distinguished piece of fiction…[Its] power of historical immediacy gives the novel its thrust, its larger and, if you wish, 'universal' value." The New York Times"I have known few authors who can evoke such a wilderness in the heart of man. He is an artist of a weight and depth that put him beyond ordinary comparisons…Coetzee knows the elusive terror of Kafka." Bernard Levin, Sunday Times (London)"The novel moves between claustrophobic enclosures and arid, exquisitely rendered open spaces that reveal treacherous trap-doors…The book keeps us on edge, uneasy." Walter Clemons, Newsweek"...
