The cosmopolitan J. M. Coetzee has lived and worked on four continents—Africa, Europe, America, and Australia—and may be the only great writer who has earned a Ph.D., a degree that usually extinguishes the creative spirit. An expert in German, Dutch, and French, he’s mastered European literature. He lectures each year at his Chair, the Cátedra Coetzee in Buenos Aires, and edits his Biblioteca Personal with the Argentine publisher Hilo de Ariadna (Ariadne’s Thread). His introductions to single works translated into Spanish, when he cannot assume the knowledge of sophisticated readers, are mixed in Late Essays with more heavyweight reviews of multiple works for The New York Review of Books.
His fourth book of criticism is composed of chapters arranged by neither chronology nor country. He begins with Defoe and Hawthorne, jumps to Ford Madox Ford and Philip Roth, goes back to the Germans Goethe, Hölderlin, and Kleist and ahead to the Swiss Robert Walser, leaps to Flaubert and Irène Nemirovsky, shifts to Spanish and Argentine writers, and adds Tolstoy before considering the modern Polish poet Zbigniew Herbert. He includes four chapters on Beckett, the subject of his dissertation; overpraises three writers from Australia, where he now teaches in Adelaide; and ends anticlimactically with the most obscure writer, a nineteenth-century African-Namibian guerrilla warrior and diarist who wrote in Dutch.
J. M. Coetzee may be the only great writer who has earned a Ph.D.
Coetzee is intelligent, insightful, and humane. He
