Review: Joy Williams on J. M. Coetzee (Part One)

In a 2011 letter to Paul Auster, J. M. Coetzee mentions a reading he gave at a literary festival. “I don’t think I distinguished myself at the festival. I was determined not to subject myself to the rounds of public questioning that have become a standard feature of festivals nowadays … So I announced that I was simply going to read a piece of fiction. This was what I did. The fiction wasn’t amusing (it was about life and death and the soul) so it was probably a bad choice for that kind of occasion. The audience response: respectful but puzzled.”

The piece of fiction was surely from The Childhood of Jesus, which appeared in 2013 to cautious, even begrudging reviews. Three years later The Schooldays of Jesus was published. After another three The Death of Jesus appeared, concluding Coetzee’s remarkable trilogy.

As the work accrued over the decade reviewers remained puzzled but grew more arrogantly and dismissively so. And there was less “respect” offered. One critic referred to the work as Coetzee’s “own cranky late Tolstoyan phase.” Others dismissed it as allegory or accused the Nobel winner of mocking us, the readers, enjoying dour fun at our expense as we labored over our determinations of the author’s intent. It was not about Jesus at all though much seemed … familiar. It was not about exiles or immigrants or politics or child rearing or education … though it gestured toward these subjects. It was not about evil or grace or love, or rather it was, but these verities were as shadows, shades. What it is about is the soul. The demands of the evolution of an aspiring soul.

The complete work is over seven hundred pages. It commences with no invocation of a past, proceeds through a bland, orderly, unreal, that is, nontechnological, present, and deposits the main character, the future in the guise of a questioning, charismatic, “exceptional” child, as ashes in a niche behind a plaque on the grounds of an orphanage. The plaque reads simply: David. Recordado con afecto.