Inner Workings

J.M. Coetzee’s work includesWaiting for the Barbarians;Life and Times of Michael K;Boyhood: Scenes from Provincial Life;Youth;Disgrace; and most recently,Slow Man. He has won the Booker Prize twice and was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2003.A collection of essays on literature by one of the world’s finest writers.

Following on fromStranger Shores, which contained J.M. Coetzee’s essays from 1986 to 1999,Inner Workingsgathers together his literary essays from 2000 to 2005.

Of the writers discussed in the first half of the book, several — Italo Svevo, Joseph Roth, Bruno Schulz, Sandor Marai — lived through the Austro-Hungarian fin-de-siècle and felt the influence of Schopenhauer, Nietzsche and Freud. Coetzee further explores the work of six of twentieth-century German literature’s greatest writers: Robert Musil, Robert Walser, Walter Benjamin (the Arcades Project), Joseph Roth, Gunter Grass, W.G. Sebald, and the poet Paul Celan, in his “wrestlings with the German language.”

There is an essay on Graham Greene’sBrighton Rockand on the short fiction of Samuel Beckett, a writer whom Coetzee has long admired. American literature is strongly represented by Walt Whitman through William Faulkner, Saul Bellow and Arthur Miller to Philip Roth. Coetzee rounds off the collection with essays on three fellow Nobel laureates: Nadine Gordimer, Gabriel Garcia Marquez and V.S. Naipaul.“Coetzee the critic is every bit as good as Coetzee the novelist.”–Irish Times

“Coetzee writes well about the technicalities of literature: like an engineer he dismantles the texts and suggests ways in which they might run more efficiently.”–Scotland on Sunday