Recent reading, notable titles in red as usual, most completed on the deck at my parents' place on Bowen Island, or some combination of ferry and bus on the way to and from Bowen.

J.M. Coetzee, Waiting for the Barbarians

Ron Suskind, The One Percent Doctrine

Lou Krieger & Sheree Bykofsky, Secrets the Pros Won't Tell You About Winning Hold 'Em Poker

J.M. Coetzee, Youth

I first ran across Coetzee's Disgrace on a "contexts for my work" list Jeff Wall wrote for his recent Tate Gallery retrospective. Faced with a line-up including Kant, Hegel, and every volume of Proust's Remembrance of Things Past, I opted to begin in the shallow end of the page-count pool: Bresson's Notes to the Cinematographer (aphorisms; fragments) and Disgrace. Disgrace begins by recounting a typical middle-aged male academic's brief and unhappy liason with a student, then takes a screaming left turn into political allegory about sixty pages in. Its final paragraph, which describes its protagonist relinquishing an injured young dog he loves to the euthanasist's needle, is one of those moments that quieted me on the morning bus. My heart keeps missing a beat. Well, yes, as if one of those less friendly ghosts of mine had materialized there, in that packed cattle-car. Pointing. Saying, We could relinquish you. 8a.m. sun, Broadway's camera shops and Thai restaurants and Dairy Queens reeling past, the low, constant buzz of conversation and Coetzee's narrative like an echo of that ghost's grim verdict: In the end we will all relinquish you.

So, no red boldface for Disgrace. But I Wikipediaed the bibliography, most of which I'd never seen, and started looking. Waiting for the Barbarians, purchased in Calgary on the way to Banff for the comics conference, is a masterpiece. This strange allegorical book, which recounts the life of a frontier magistrate in the pay of an unnamed internally collapsing empire, and his act of witness as his outpost slowly melts into the shifting sands it was founded upon, reminds me of Kafka's best parables, and the Cormac McCarthy who wrote Blood Meridian. It's a remarkable novel. The Kafka comparison isn't overstated; Barbarians is as well-written, as merciless and as clear-eyed as any of Kafka's work. Read it!

Youth, which I finished last night, is a lesser but no less well written book, a thinly fictionalized account of Coetzee's emigration from South Africa to London as a young man. I red-bolded it, too, while recognizing that, objectively speaking, it's not up to Barbarians' standard. How could it be? Most writers are lucky to have a single masterpiece; not everyone's career flops an ace-high flush. Most of us must be content with a single or two pair. But certain parts of Youth struck deeply with me: the narrator's acute provinciality, his sense of always somehow pacing a step or two behind the the avant-garde. And Coetzee's London is as grey as Vancouver in November, all sulphurous, chilly fogs and freezing rain.
- posted by cjb @ 1:26 PM