J.M.Coetzee is a novelist who deals with the most appalling acts of violence and yet whose manners and tone remain lucid and precise. Before his steady gaze one feels the truth emerging, as illusion after illusion is stripped away. And the same is true of his criticism: "Can academic critics take a lesson from Brodsky? I fear not. To operate at his level, one has to live with and by the great poets of the past, and perhaps be visited by the Muse as well. Can Brodsky take a lesson from the academy? Yes: not to publish your lecture notes verbatim, unrevised and uncondensed, quips and asides included."
Or, again, on William Gass's ambitious Rilke book: "Gass has a gift for the snappy phrase; his insights into Rilke are often mordantly accurate; but a side effect is to convey an attitude towards Rilke that is perhaps unintended; that, compared with William Gass, Rilke was perhaps a bit of a fool, a bit of a booby."
This is not an attempt to score points or impress the reader; Coetzee is above such things. He is simply interested in understanding, in getting it right, and in conveying to the reader in as clear and simple a way as possible the virtues and weaknesses of the books or authors he is dealing with. The simplicity, though, runs deep. When he writes of Alan Paton that "his later fiction, in particular, is vitiated by a sentimentality that Cry, The Beloved Country escapes only by the sheer power of its sentiment", he is making a point about the power of certain kinds of popular novels that is missed by critics like Barthes and Eco in their often very funny and devastating critiques of popular taste.
As a South African, English-language writer of Dutch descent Coetzee is admirably suited to review (and many of the pieces in this collection are reviews) works in Dutch and German, works by South African writers or those dealing with South Africa, works on Third World issues, and works by writers who, in various ways, have been displaced by history, such as the Israeli novelist Aharon Appelfeld and Salman Rushdie. About the former he makes a point that is important though rarely made, that "the picture of Austrian life that emerges is as spiritually mean as anything produced by Thomas Bernhard, to whom Appelfeld is closer in tone and feeling than to his Israeli coevals."
About Rushdie he comes as close to being snide as he does anywhere in the book: "Like Midnight's Children (1981), Shame (1983) and The Satanic Verses (1989), The Moor's Last Sigh is a novel with large ambitions composed on a large scale. Its structure, is, however, anything but sturdy."
Unlike many reviewers, Coetzee always does his homework. The pieces on Dostoevsky, Rilke, Kafka and Musil convey the impression not only of someone thoroughly at home in their works, but also of someone aware of the recent scholarship connected with those works. Reviewing a novel by Cees Noteboom he quietly fills the reader in on that author's untranslated works, while a full-length essay on Nadine Gordimer knowledgeably explores the relationship of her work to Turgenev's Fathers and Sons, with its attempt to chart a course for liberalism between the extremes of reaction and radicalism in the Russia of the 1860s. "How far," asks Coetzee, "can the claim be sustained that Turgenev was above politics? More pointedly, what aspect does the politics of being above politics take in Fathers and Sons?"
That question, which in the mouth of many a recent academic critic would be merely rhetorical, is never that for Coetzee. It surfaces again in the gem of the collection, the lecture 'What is a Classic?', delivered in Austria in 1991 and so far only published in journal form. Starting with Eliot's own lecture of that title, delivered in October 1944, Coetzee brings out the personal anxieties and ambitions that lie behind the magisterial assertions; Eliot, the American who belongs nowhere in America, the fake Englishman and European, is staking out a claim to absolute centrality. "There are many ways of understanding a life's enterprise like Eliot's," Coetzee says, "among which I will isolate two. One, broadly sympathetic, is to treat these transcendental experiences as the subject's point of origin and read the entirety of the rest of the enterprise in their light. This is an approach which would take seriously the call from Virgil that seems to come to Eliot across the centuries. It would trace the self-fashioning that takes place in the wake of that call as part of a lived poetic vocation . . . The other (and broadly unsympathetic) way of understanding Eliot is the socio-cultural one I outlined a moment ago: of treating his efforts as the essentially magical enterprise of a man trying to redefine the world around himself . . . rather than confronting the reality of his not-so-grand position as a man whose narrowly academic, Eurocentric education had prepared him for little else but life as a mandarin in one of the New England ivory towers."
How Coetzee mediates between the two, by way of an autobiographical aside and an exploration of the music and reputation of Bach, is the subject of the rest of the essay. Basically he rescues the idea of a classic from the charge of timelessness and essentialism by rooting it in practice and testing: "Today, every time a beginner stumbles through the first prelude of the Forty-Eight, Bach is being tested again, within the profession. Dare I suggest that the classic in music is what emerges intact from this process of day-by-day testing?" It's a marvellous essay, and the book is worth buying for it alone. Coetzee the critic is every bit as good as Coetzee the novelist.
Gabriel Josipovici is an author and critic; A Life was published earlier this year, and his new novel, Goldberg: Variations, is due out next year