Nobelist Coetzee Excuses Suicide Bombers, Flirts With Filipina

c.2007 Bloomberg News

Review by Hephzibah Anderson

(Bloomberg) — An insecure South African author with the initials J.C. inhabits J.M. Coetzee's "Diary of a Bad Year," a postmodernist melange of essays and fiction that is surprisingly entertaining, sporadically enlightening and more than a little frustrating.

The first thing you'll notice about Coetzee's latest book are the horizontal lines dividing each page into two (and then three) sections. In the top layer are the essays, 55 in all, covering subjects stretching from Guantanamo Bay to the rhythmic nimbleness of Johann Sebastian Bach. Tensions between the individual and the state form a constant refrain.

Further down on the page comes a confessional, diary-style section by J.C., a novelist with a "modest reputation" who wrote the essays. His German publisher has invited him to contribute to a collection called "Strong Opinions."

Like Coetzee, this writer has moved to Australia, though he's almost a decade older. At 72, J.C. lives alone in a Sydney apartment block, where neighbors mistake him for a South American and take to calling him "Senor C."

Struggling to meet his deadline and losing motor control to Parkinson's disease, he one day bumps into a feisty Filipina beauty in the laundry room. She has "black black hair, shapely bones" and, well, "a certain golden glow to her skin." Her name is Anya. Galvanized by a "metaphysical ache," Senor C. hires her as his typist, though she quickly becomes his muse and critic as well.

Tips on Seduction

Anya pipes up on page 25 to narrate the book's third component, a diary of her own that runs along the bottom of each page, offering an irreverent take on Senor C. and his work, along with tips on seduction and glimpses of life with her boyfriend, an obnoxious investment consultant named Alan.

Their brevity and abrasiveness notwithstanding, Senor C.'s essays are tortuous, mired in slippery enterprises such as trying to rationalize suicide bombings. With Anya sneering and demanding more plot, it's unclear how seriously we're meant to take them.

"Why do you write this stuff?" she grumbles. "Why don't you write another novel instead? Isn't that what you are good at, novels?"

The friendship that develops between coquettish, kind-hearted Anya and Senor C. changes them both. While he begins doubting his own opinions, Anya's boyfriend Alan grows jealous, creating a wonky triangle.

Alan also covets the millions that he's convinced the old man has stashed away. Obsessed, he secretly installs spyware on Senor C.'s computer, lending some needed suspense to the book. When Anya finds out, it forever alters her feelings for Alan.

Discordant Melody

In its final third, "Diary of a Bad Year" changes tone. Anya has persuaded Senor C. to write less about politics and to include essays on more personal themes — his father, love, fan mail. Intimations of mortality are never far away. Meanwhile, big changes have occurred in her own life.

Anya is one of a long line of spirited ingenues created by male authors, taking their cue from George Bernard Shaw's Eliza Doolittle. Though she provides levity, she never quite becomes more than a figment of fantasy.

As for the novel's structure, it makes the reader all too tempted to skip parts and follow a single strand through to the end. If you persevere and read each page as it's presented, though, you will hear a discordant melody running between the idealism of the essays, Senor C.'s frank human frailty and Anya's earthy, nurturing goodness.

Though the relentless trickery obscures its more thoughtful qualities, this book as a whole does hint at the challenges of living, loving and writing in the 21st century.

"Diary of a Bad Year" is from Harvill Secker in the U.K. (231 pages, 16.99 pounds). It will be published by Viking in the U.S. in December ($24.95).

(Hephzibah Anderson is a critic for Bloomberg News. The opinions expressed are her own.)

—Editors: Pressley (jmr/fnn/mrb).

To contact the reporter on this story: Hephzibah Anderson at hephzibah—andersonhotmail.com.

To contact the editor responsible for this story: James Pressley at +32-2-285-4308 or jpressleybloomberg.net.

-0- Sep/04/2007 20:38 GMT