J.M. Coetzee
"David Attwell defends the literary and political integrity of the South African novelist J. M. Coetzee, arguing that he has absorbed the textual turn of postmodern culture while still addressing his nation's ethical crisis. As a form of "situational metafiction," Coetzee's novels are shown to reconstruct and critique some of the key discourses in the history of colonialism and apartheid from the eighteenth century to the present. While self-conscious about fiction-making, Coetzee's work takes seriously the condition of the society in which it is produced." "Attwell begins by describing the intellectual and political contexts of Coetzee's fiction. He proceeds with a developmental analysis of the corpus of six novels, drawing on Coetzee's other writings in stylistics, literary criticism, translation, political journalism, and popular culture. Attwell's elegantly written analysis deals both with Coetzee's subversion of the dominant culture around him and with his ability to grasp the complexities of giving voice to the anguish of South Africa."--BOOK JACKET.
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- Until a few years ago I would have answered "Um copo de cólera", by Raduan Nassar... but then I read "Crônica da casa assassinada", by Lúcio Cardoso.
My favorite music album is "Fun House", by The Stooges. "Um copo de cólera" has the same chaotic fury of "Fun House", but transposed to literature - and "Um copo de cólera" is the same, but it was written 20 years earlier, is even stronger, and it touches lots of tabboo topics.
I don't know if there are decent translations of them from Portuguese to other languages.
My favorite book _that is available in English_ is "The Lives of Animals", by J.M. Coetzee: <https://tannerlectures.utah.edu/_resources/documents/a-to-z/...>.
- Read heavy fiction. Try Jorge Luis Borges, or the Nobel winning J M Coetzee.
Krishnamurti is worth a read.
- J.M. Coetzee wrote a novella called Youth: http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2002/may/04/fiction.jmcoetze... – it features a great section about programming at IBM during the 60s, and although the book itself is not wholly about computers or programming, it does deal with some of those themes (isolation, poetry).
- Some of the books in my 2020 to be read basket:
Cultural Amnesia by Clive James
Exhalation by Ted Chiang
Silver, Sword & Stone: Three Crucibles in the Latin American Story by Maria Arana
The World As I Found It by Bruce Duffy
Alice And Bob Meet The Wall Of Fire edited by Thomas Lin
Masscult and Midcult by Dwight Macdonald
Big Bang by David Bowman
White Noise by Don DeLillo
The Wizard and the Prophet by Charles C. Mann
A House for Mr. Biwas by V. S. Naipaul
A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again by David Foster Wallace
On The Abolition Of All Political Parties by Simone Weil
Collected Stories by Bruno Schulz
On Being The Right Size by J. B. S. Haldane
Bela Tarr, The Time After by Jacques Ranciere
La Vida Breve by Juan Carlos Onetti
The Clown by Heinrich Boll
Memoirs From Beyond The Grave by Francois-Rene De Chateubriand
Blood Dark by Louis Guilloux
The Liberal Imagination by Lionel Trilling
Cuentos Completos by Juan Carlos Onetti
Balcony In The Forest by Julien Gracq
Historia De España Contada Para Escépticos by Juan Eslava Galán
Diez Lecciones Sobre Los Clásicos by Piero Boitani
Waiting For The Barbarians by J. M. Coetzee
97,196 Words by Emmanuel Carrere
Brief Interviews With Hideous Men by David Foster Wallace
El Zafarrancho Aquel De Via Merulana by Carlo Emilio Gadda
- This is exactly what I thought of Disgrace by J.M. Coetzee.
Someone else could have written that book, and we'd all be better off for it having never been published.
I wonder if I'll ever try to reread it hoping I missed something.
- The Nobel prize winning author J. M. Coetzee worked as a programmer when he was young - he describes it in his autobiographical novel, Youth. The promiment novelist Richard Powers worked as a programmer when he was young - that part of his life is described in the recent book, The Friendly Orange Glow.
