J.M. Coetzee, página 2 de 12

Elizabeth Costello is an Australian writer of international renown. Famous principally for an early novel that established her reputation, she has reached the stage where her remaining function is to be venerated and applauded. Her life has become a series of engagements in sterile conference rooms throughout the world - a private consciousness obliged to reveal itself to a curious public: the presentation of a major award at an American college where she is required to deliver a lecture a sojourn as the writer in residence on a cruise liner a visit to her sister, a missionary in Africa, who is receiving an honorary degree, an occasion which both recognise as the final opportunity for effecting some form of reconciliation and a disquieting appearance at a writers'' conference in Amsterdam where she finds the subject of her talk unexpectedly amongst the audience. She has made her life''s work the study of other people yet now it is she who is the object of scrutiny. But, for her, what matters is the continuing search for a means of articulating her vision and the verdict of future generations.

After years teaching Romantic poetry at the Technical University of Cape Town, David Lurie, middle-aged and twice divorced, has an impulsive affair with a student. The affair sours; he is denounced and summoned before a committee of inquiry. Willing to admit his guilt, but refusing to yield to pressue to repent publicly, he resigns and retreats to his daughter Lucy's isolated small holding. For a time, his daughter's influence and natural rhythms of the farm promise to harmonise his discordant life. But the balance of power in the country is shifting. He and Lucy become victims of a savage and disturbing attack which brings into relief all the faultlines in their relationship.

In South Africa after apartheid, a middle-aged professor of Romantic poetry sees his career crumble as the world turns more to technology than to literature. After a series of ever more degrading misadventures, including a charge of sexual harassment, he ends up on his daughter's farm. There, after further disgraces--his daughter is raped and he is attacked and disfigured--he is able to reconcile himself to his stunted life by caring for animals and, finally, feeling a kind of kinship with them.

A young English biographer is working on a book about the late writer, John Coetzee. He plans to focus on the years from 1972 1977 when Coetzee, in his thirties, is sharing a run-down cottage in the suburbs of Cape Town with his widowed father. This, the biographer senses, is the period when he was 'finding his feet as a writer'. Never having met Coetzee, he embarks on a series of interviews with people who were important to him a married woman with whom he had an affair, his favourite cousin Margot, a Brazilian dancer whose daughter had English lessons with him, former friends and colleagues. From their testimony emerges a portrait of the young Coetzee as an awkward, bookish individual with little talent for opening himself to others. Within the family he is regarded as an outsider, someone who tried to flee the tribe and has now returned, chastened. His insistence on doing manual work, his long hair and beard, rumours that he writes poetry evoke nothing but suspicion in the South Africa of the time. Sometimes heartbreaking, often very funny, Summertime shows us a great writer as he limbers up for his task. It completes the majestic trilogy of fictionalised memoir begun with Boyhood and Youth.

An eminent Australian writer is invited to contribute to a book entitled "Strong Opinions". For him, troubled by Australias complicity in the wars in the Middle East, it is a chance to air some urgent concerns: how should a citizen of a modern democracy react to their states involvement in a war that involves the use of torture?

A fascinating dialogue on the human inclination to make up stories between a Nobel Prize-winning writer and a psychotherapist.The Good Story is an exchange between a writer with a long-standing interest in moral psychology and a psychotherapist with a training in literary studies.Arabella Kurtz and J. M. Coetzee consider psychotherapy and its wider social context from different perspectives, but at the heart of both their approaches is a concern with stories. Working alone, the writer is in sole charge of the story he or she tells. The therapist, on the other hand, collaborates with the patient in telling the story of their life. What kind of truth do the stories created by patient and therapist aim to uncover: objective truth or the shifting and subjective truth of memories explored and re-experienced in the safety of the therapeutic relationship?The authors discuss both individual psychology and the psychology of the group: the school classroom, the gang, the settler nation where the brutal deeds of the ancestors have to be accommodated into a national story. Drawing on great writers like Cervantes and Dostoevsky and on psychoanalysts like Freud and Melanie Klein, they offer illuminating insights into the stories we tell of our lives.

LONGLISTED FOR THE MAN BOOKER PRIZE 2016When you travel across the ocean on a boat, all your memories are washed away and you start a completely new life. That is how it is. There is no before. There is no history. The boat docks at the harbour and we climb down the gangplank and we are plunged into the here and now. Time begins.David is the small boy who is always asking questions. Simon and Ines take care of him in their new town Estrella. He is learning the language; he has begun to make friends. He has the big dog Bolivar to watch over him. But he''ll be seven soon and he should be at school. And so, David is enrolled in the Academy of Dance. It''s here, in his new golden dancing slippers, that he learns how to call down the numbers from the sky. But it''s here too that he will make troubling discoveries about what grown-ups are capable of.In this mesmerising allegorical tale, Coetzee deftly grapples with the big questions of growing up, of what it means to be a parent, the constant battle between intellect and emotion, and how we choose to live our lives.

A fascinating dialogue on the human inclination to make up stories between a Nobel Prize-winning writer and a psychotherapist.Arabella Kurtz and J. M. Coetzee consider psychotherapy and its wider social context from different perspectives, but at the heart of both their approaches is a concern with stories. Working alone, the writer is in sole charge of the story he or she tells. The therapist, on the other hand, collaborates with the patient in telling the story of their life. What kind of truth do the stories created by patient and therapist aim to uncover: objective truth or the shifting and subjective truth of memories explored and re-experienced in the safety of the therapeutic relationship?The authors discuss both individual psychology and the psychology of the group: the school classroom, the gang, the settler nation where the brutal deeds of the ancestors have to be accommodated into a national story. Drawing on great writers like Cervantes and Dostoevsky and on psychoanalysts like Freud and Melanie Klein, they offer illuminating insights into the stories we tell of our lives.

n écrivain quinquagénaire, qui vient d’acheter une maison dans un village espagnol médite sur les rapports profonds qui le rattachent à elle et se raccroche à une certaine idée du bonheur.La ferme (2

A divorced, middle-aged English professor finds himself increasingly unable to resist affairs with his female students. When discovered by the college authorities, he is expected to apologise and repent in an effort to save his job, but he refuses to become a scapegoat in what he sees as a show trial designed to reinforce a stringent political correctness. He preempts the authorities and leaves his job, and the city, to spend time with his grown-up lesbian daughter on her remote farm.Things between them are strained - there is much from the past they need to reconcile - and the situation becomes critical when they are the victims of a brutal and horrifying attack. In spectacularly powerful and lucid prose, Coetzee uses all his formidable skills to engage with a post-apartheid culture in unexpected and revealing ways. This examination into the sexual and political lawlines of modern South Africa as it tries desperately to start a fresh page in its history is chilling, uncompromising and unforgettable.

A young English biographer is working on a book about the late writer, John Coetzee. He plans to focus on the years from 1972-1977 when Coetzee, in his thirties, is sharing a run-down cottage in the suburbs of Cape Town with his widowed father. This, the biographer senses, is the period when he was ''finding his feet as a writer''. Never having met Coetzee, he embarks on a series of interviews with people who were important to him - a married woman with whom he had an affair, his favourite cousin Margot, a Brazilian dancer whose daughter had English lessons with him, former friends and colleagues. From their testimony emerges a portrait of the young Coetzee as an awkward, bookish individual with little talent for opening himself to others. Within the family he is regarded as an outsider, someone who tried to flee the tribe and has now returned, chastened. His insistence on doing manual work, his long hair and beard, rumours that he writes poetry evoke nothing but suspicion in the South Africa of the time. Sometimes heartbreaking, often very funny, "Summertime" shows us a great writer as he limbers up for his task.It completes the majestic trilogy of fictionalised memoir begun with "Boyhood" and "Youth".

"Esta antología es personal en dos sentidos. Primero, está formada por poemas que significan y significaron mucho para mí. Segundo, está formada por poemas que responden a mi estándar personal de excelencia poetica.Si hay un tema en la antologia, este aparece de manera tenue: la nostalgia de una epoca en que habia muchos dioses.De la Introduccion de J. M. Coetzee (Premio Nobel de Literatura)"

Susan Barton finds herself marooned on an island in the Atlantic with an Englishman named Robinson Cruso and his mute (mutilated) slave, Friday. Rescued after a year of Cruso's company, back in England with Friday in tow, she approaches the author Daniel Foe, offering him the story.

"Susan Barton naufraga in un''isola abitata solo da un uomo enigmatico, Cruso, e dal suo servitore, Venerdi. Del loro passato, Susan riesce a sapere poco o nulla. Cruso le rivela solo che Venerdi e incapace di parlare: qualcuno gli ha mozzato la lingua quand''era ancora bambino, condannandolo a un eterno silenzio. Dopo la morte di Cruso, Susan, salvata e riportata in Inghilterra insieme a Venerdi ha un unico desiderio: che uno scrittore, Foe, racconti dell''isola, di lei, di Cruso e, soprattutto, dia voce al silenzio di Venerdi che, giorno dopo giorno, si fa insopportabile. Coetzee reinventa la vicenda di Robinson Crusoe, puntando lo sguardo sulla narrazione, arte tirannica, mistificatoria, e pero necessaria, l''unica salvezza nell''oscuro disegno della vita. "