Late Essays : 2006-2017 by J.M. Coetzee
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

"This modest but beautifully composed little ten-page episode does indeed provide a good education, and not just for older persons: how to dig a grave, how to write, how to face death, all in one."

Late Essays 2006 - 2017 is the 22nd book by J.M. Coetzee that I am reviewing here and the fourth collection of essays by the Nobel Prize winner in literature, after Stranger Shores , Inner Workings , and Giving Offense: Essays on Censorship . The collection is a totally wonderful, serious, demanding read, which could well be used as a learning tool for students who intend to become literary critics. The set contains 23 essays; I am only providing unorganized thoughts on some of the essays. I wouldn't be able to synthesize these impressions into a full-fledged review of the entire collection.

In the essay on Philip Roth's Nemesis Coetzee demonstrates superb sense of humor when he writes about certain character being a virgin "in a Clintonian sense." But it is really a serious essay about serious issues. We read "God is just another name for Chance," and Coetzee provides a strong ending for the essay when he writes about an episode from Roth's Everyman, which I quote in the epigraph.

In the essay about a story written in the early 1800s by Heinrich von Kleist Coetzee addresses one of my hot-button subjects. Suppose an author, on purpose, does not clearly state what happens to characters in the story at some point of the plot. Consider a reader's question "What has really happened?" Coetzee counters with his question "What does 'really' mean?" To me it touches upon the readers injecting their own fictions into the author's fiction in order to make it more realistic to them.

I love the essay titled "Antonio Di Benedetto, Zama". I have not read that novel, apparently one of the major works of Argentine literature and I have now put it on my "To read" list. In the next essay Coetzee writes about Leo Tolstoy's works and focuses on The Death of Ivan Ilyich, one of the best novellas I have ever read, a relentlessly realistic and thus terrifying account of a man dying. He ends the essay with a powerful quote:

"In both of these stories Tolstoy pits his powerful rhetoric of salvation against the commonsense scepticism of the consumer of fiction, who like Ivan Ilyich in his heyday looks to works of literature for civilized entertainment and no more."

I have been tremendously impressed by Coetzee's essay on the Polish poet, Zbigniew Herbert. The South African/Australian writer shows deep understanding of the political situation in the Soviet-controlled countries in Eastern Europe after the Second World War, and particularly of the more benign yet no less morally corrupting Polish brand of Soviet-style ideology.

Two essays are dedicated to works by the great Australian writer, Patrick White, two of whose novels are among the best books I have read in my life, The Eye of the Storm and The Aunt's Story, which I reviewed here on Goodreads. In the first essay Coetzee focuses on White's Vivisector and in the other on The Solid Mandala, a novel that is on my "Read Immediately" shelf.

Strongly recommended jewel of literary criticism.

Four stars.

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