Slacklining

in
Slacklining

Sunday pages.

The walk up to Deer Park stream: some gentle people are stringing up a cord between two stone pines. Then they spend Sunday tight-rope walking above the lawns. The gap between the two trees chosen is long; they have winches and climbing gear to get the necessary tautness; a picnic blanket and basket; significant sunglasses and (one of them) splendid brown slacks – I almost stop to ask where they bought such trousers. Drifts of plastic litter and empty food packaging along the stream. Homeless people do their laundry here but I think that today it is employed citizens who are lying face down on the grass, asleep. After the grind of a daily job, the vicious commute that Cape Town’s geography demands, the ongoing transport strike – after all that you see people just exhausted on Sundays, pole-axed on municipal lawns all through the city...

Read More

Getting Past Coetzee

in
Screenshot+2020-01-05+at+16.45.16.jpg

In the shadow of the Nobel laureate.

Financial Times, 28 December 2012.

There remains the matter of getting past Coetzee. Dusklands (1974).

There is an odd made-for-television documentary from 1997 which shows footage of JM Coetzee conducting a guided tour of Cape Town’s southern suburbs. From the slopes of Table Mountain he points out the hospital where he was born; the suburb of Plumstead where he lived as a young boy; the university campus where he spent much of his academic career. A colleague recalls how Coetzee would not take calls from the Booker prize committee because he was invigilating undergraduate exams: a measure of his professionalism. We visit his Standard Three classroom at Rosebank Primary and the grassy common where he participated in school sports days. He recalls taking gold in the running backwards race of 1948, as if enjoying a wry joke at the expense of anyone who thought that such an exercise might grant some privileged insight into his work... 
[Continue reading...]       

PDF: Page 1| Page 2 

First published in Bokvennen litterært magasin | Oslo | nr. 3.12

These somewhat unfair thoughts are stirred by Disgrace, which is a very good novel, almost too good a novel...It sometimes reads as if it were the winner of an exam whose challenge was to create the perfect specimen of a very good contemporary novel.

James Wood, ‘Coetzee's Disgrace: A Few Skeptical Thoughts’, The Irresponsible Self (2004).