Product Description

A new work of fiction by the Nobel Prize–winning author of Disgrace

In this brilliant new work of fiction, J. M. Coetzee once again breaks new literary ground with a book that is, in the words of its main character, “a response to the present in which I find myself.” Diary of a Bad Year takes on the world of politics—a new topic for Coetzee—and explores the role of the writer in our times with an extraordinary moral compass.

At the center of the book is “Señor C,” an aging author who has been asked to write his thoughts on the state of the world by his German publisher. These thoughts, called “Strong Opinions,” address a wide range of subjects and include a scathing indictment of Bush, Cheney, and Blair, as well as a witheringly honest examination of everything from Machiavelli and the current state of the university to music, literature, and intelligent design, offering unexpected perceptions and insightful arguments along the way. Meanwhile, someone new enters the writer’s life: Anya, the beautiful young woman whom he hires to type his manuscript. The relationship that develops between Señor C and Anya has a profound effect on both of them. It also changes the course of Anya’s relationship with Alan, the successful, swaggering man whom she lives with—and who has designs on Señor C’s bank account. Through these characters, Coetzee creates an ingenious literary game that will enthrall readers and surprise them with its emotional power. Bold, funny, and sad, as well as intellectually clever and satisfying, Diary of a Bad Year is a journey into the mind and heart of one of the world’s most acclaimed and accomplished writers.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #71714 in Books
• Published on: 2007-12-27
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 240 pages

From Publishers Weekly
Nobelist Coetzee's 19th book features a stand-in for himself: Señor C, a white 72-year-old South African writer living in Australia who has written Waiting for the Barbarians. C falls into a metaphysical passion for his sexy 29-year-old Filipina neighbor, Anya, and quickly plots to spend more time with her by offering her a job as his typist. C's latest project is a series of political and philosophical essays, and Coetzee divides each page of the present novel in three: any given page features a bit of an essay (often its title and opening paragraph) at the top; C's POV in the middle; and Anya's voice at the bottom. C's opinions in the essays are mostly on the left (he despises Bush, Blair & Co., and is opposed to the Iraq War) and they bore Anya, who wants something less lofty. Meanwhile, Anya's lover, Alan—a smart, conservative 42-year-old investment consultant who's good in the sack, and who stands for everything C despises—becomes increasingly scornful and jealous, and eventually concocts an elaborate plan to defraud C. of money. Unfortunately, Anya is little more than a trophy to be disputed, and Alan as an unscrupulous, boorish reactionary is a caricature. While C's essays, especially the later ones inspired by Anya, hold some interest, this follow-up to Slow Year is not one of Coetzee's major efforts. (Jan.)
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From The Washington Post

Reviewed by Louis Begley

J.M. Coetzee is a great novelist, perhaps the greatest writing today, and has garnered just about every important prize awarded for fiction written in English, including the Nobel Prize for Literature. By common consent his most powerful work is Disgrace, published in 1999, in form an old fashioned realistic novel that one can readily imagine having been written by Dostoevsky, Coetzee's acknowledged master, if the terrifying event at the center of its plot -- the gang rape of a young lesbian in the South African bush -- were transposed to Russia during one of its periods of violence and chaos. Coetzee's previous novels, Waiting for the Barbarians (1980), Age of Iron (1990) and The Master of Petersburg (1994) among them, are likewise in the realist tradition. They are stories plausible enough for the reader to accept them as true. To quote the protagonist of Coetzee's new novel, Diary of a Bad Year, such stories "tell themselves, they don't get told." The author doesn't intrude in the space between the version of reality he has created and the reader, or otherwise take the risk of breaking the spell he has cast.

Since Disgrace, however, Coetzee has been engaged in a fascinating effort to bend the realist novel into a new medium. Diary of a Bad Year is the most recent example of that enterprise; the mesmerizing and beautiful novel Elizabeth Costello (2003) was the first. In the latter work Coetzee introduced an alter ego, a famous female writer, born in 1928, and the author of nine novels, a volume of poems, a book on birds and a body of journalism -- an oeuvre closely corresponding to Coetzee's. We see her deliver seven lectures. Among them: one on the novel, two on animal rights (these were in fact given by Coetzee at Princeton) and one on Eros as it affects men and gods. The last chapter is a retelling of the parable of the Law in Kafka's Trial.

Elizabeth Costello came back on stage, as though to take a bow, in an exquisite chapter-length sequel to the novel that appeared in 2005 in the New York Review of Books, and again, much more substantially, in the novel Slow Man, also published that year. There Costello literally moves in with the protagonist, a 60-something man by the name of Rayment, living alone in Adelaide, Australia. Rayment had never met Costello before, and she is not a welcome or easy guest. But she is obsessed with him, and the difficulty she faces is that he won't cooperate. He refuses to undertake anything that makes the protagonist of a novel photogenic, such as making love to the three women who are in all likelihood available or, for that matter, Costello herself. Slow Man -- with its slow protagonist -- can be seen as a novelist's interaction with the characters of a novel that is still a work in progress and may not turn out as had been intended.

The obduracy of invented characters can be very real. The novelist comes across them somewhere in the zone of imagination and, because of a mysterious affinity, invites them to come aboard. They do -- and misbehave. Coetzee's surrogate in Diary of a Bad Year is JC (two of Coetzee's initials), another very distinguished novelist but this time originally South African, laden with honors, born in 1934 (Coetzee was born in 1940), and now living in Sydney (Coetzee, like Rayment, lives in Adelaide). Asked why he isn't writing a novel instead of the string of little essays to be published in Germany as "Strong Opinions," JC answers, "I don't have the endurance any more. To write a novel you have to be like Atlas, holding up the whole world on your shoulders and supporting it there for months and years while its affairs work themselves out. It is too much for me as I am today."

JC and Coetzee may be protesting too much. Diary of a Bad Year is an ingenious work that rivets the reader's attention, and it cannot have been easy to write. The top third of each page is occupied by the essays that JC is writing for a German publisher.

The middle third of the page tells the story of JC's relationship with Anya, a Philippine-Australian beauty he meets in his building's basement laundry room. In the manner of old men who have loved women, he feels an immediate flash of desire, but, cagy and reasonable, he resists temptation. Instead of making a pass or venturing a proposition, he engages her to type the essays he dictates into a recording machine. Her secretarial skills aren't much, but she becomes his Segretaria, his Secret Aria, an echo of Humbert Humbert's string of endearing names for Lolita. When they discuss his work, she bosses him around, adding to his infatuation.

On the bottom third of each page appears a running commentary by Anya on JC and on her own live-in affair with Alan, and also Alan's comments to Anya on JC. Alan is an Australian yob who has worked his way to being a financial consultant; in his case that may mean he is a crook. He has planted spyware on the hard drive of JC's computer, which reports on everything JC confides to his computer, especially his finances. Alan's Thatcherite lucubrations are a counterpoint for JC's sometimes quirky and more often predictable worldview: JC distrusts democracy and deplores the decline of Australian political life, loathes George W. Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld, feels shame descending upon him when he thinks of Guantanamo and Americans' use of torture. Alan, we soon learn, has concocted a larcenous scheme designed to get his hands on JC's money. Anya's response is somber and unequivocal: She will stand by her JC. More than that, she will be there to hold his hand and give him a kiss when the end comes, "just to remind him of what he is leaving behind."

So it turns out in the end that Coetzee has written a sometimes sentimental love story that plays out nicely to the legato accompaniment of his pronouncements, political and cultural, some of which hit the bull's eye while some come to the verge of pomposity. I said "his pronouncements," but of course they are JC's essays, which is a reminder that not everything in Coetzee's novel is as it seems. Except this: Lovely Anya has her heart in the right place, and JC is lucky enough to understand that. Is the experimental form the story took a success? I was amused and at the same time hoped that the marvelously inventive Mr. Coetzee will move beyond it.

Copyright 2008, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

From Bookmarks Magazine
J. M. Coetzee, who won the Nobel Prize for literature in 2003 and is one of only two writers to win the Booker Prize twice, is clearly not content to rest on his laurels. In fact, most critics consider Diary of a Bad Year to be his most ambitious work yet. While the plot itself isn’t particularly innovative, the novel’s complex narrative structure masterfully weaves multiple voices and viewpoints into a beautifully textured literary counterpoint. There are plenty of layers here: C’s biography is, of course, a mirror image of Coetzee’s. As a writer nears the end of his career, what opinions has he formed? What does he want from others—a young woman in particular—and what effect might she have on him? How malleable might his opinions be? Critics disagreed over whether reading each of the three narratives separately or reading a whole page at a time was the most rewarding method, but they generally concurred that, no matter how the novel is read, Diary of a Bad Year is a treat.
Copyright © 2004 Phillips & Nelson Media, Inc.

Customer Reviews

Novel and essays
Coetzee's latest novel sits in the 'old man lit' tradition, a small genre presided over mainly by the world's most elderly, most eminent male writers (Philip Roth at the forefront) who realize in their developing senescence that their life's work of masterful literary output, mantlepieces groaning with awards, and thousands of acolytes are scant consolation when the one thing they really want - to sleep with beautiful young women, is denied them due to the linear nature of time that withers all in the end.

The novel in keeping with late period Coetzee is a meta-fiction. An eminent 72 year old novelist living in Sydney, John C (a bit like the real JC) is asked by a German publisher to write a series of essays for an anthology entitled 'Strong Opinions' (clear Nabokovian overtones, I'm not sure why). The book is split into three sections. The top of each page contains the essays that John C writes take up about half the book: thoughtful, cerebral pieces from a liberal bent covering a multitude of current topics such as the nature of the state, the state of universities, the slaugher of animals (strong Coetzee territory), tourism, Tony Blair, you name it.

Running parallel to these essays are little itsy-bitsy slivers of novel proper, telling the story of John C encountering a sultry young woman in the laundry room of his apartment building and paying her to become his secretary to type up his manuscript. Things become complex as the woman, Anya, who is little more than a bimbo, tells her boyfriend Alan, an investment consultant, what she is up to. Ideologies and male egos clash as Alan and John C eye each other up suspiciously, each questioning the other's motives, leading to a messy entanglement.

Diary of a Bad year is an elegant, intellectual curiosity of a novel. It provides much to think about, and does capture many of the anxieties of people living in contemporary democracies. But there is rarely substantial meat for the reader to sink his or her teeth into. John C says at one point that writing a novel entails making like Atlas, holding an entire world on your shoulders, a task he no longer has the energy for. Perhaps the real John Coetzee feels the same. It looks as if his 1999 masterpiece 'Disgrace' will be the last novel proper we get from him, and now we must be satisfied with a mixture of essay and plays on the nature of fiction and writing. This book will, like Coetzee's two previous novels, Elizabeth Costello and Slow Man, appeal more to the reader who wants a challenging account of ideas and sexual desire rather than a good old fashioned story.

A stylist honed at his craft
DIARY OF A BAD YEAR begins with an essay about the formation of the state and Hobbes's social contract. By the end of the page, the aging writer speaks for himself, and we meet the protagonist who is writing the essay. On page two we're back to the social contract, which goes on to lament that such thought is outdated. When was the last time that someone signed one of these contracts by free choice? Then we return to the narrator, who starts hungrily lusting after a sexy young tart in his apartment complex with whom he flirts awkwardly. A few chapters in, the girl, Anya, starts speaking for herself, and her loving talk about the shape of her rear begins the third narrative in DIARY OF A BAD YEAR.

The withered Senor C asks Anya to type his collection of essays, STRONG OPINIONS. Bored and between jobs, she agrees, fully aware (and reveling) that she is hired as eye candy. It's not like she needs the money: her boyfriend Alan --- a horny, insensitive, greedy I-banker who only wants Anya as a trophy --- gives her all the cash she needs so she may shop and look pretty for him.

So commences a chronicle of one man's literary process: the essays he writes, his conversations with Anya, and her criticism as well as private diary-esque side of the story. In this last part, a second plot develops: Alan seems obsessed with ruining C and stealing his money, and has developed an elaborate scheme to do so. It is here that Anya's personal growth shows, as she repeatedly defends the old man, someone she barely knows, from this hawk.

At its best, the novel is a web of interconnections: Anya provides her distinctly non-academic viewpoint on C's essays as she types them up, and so we read a discussion of an essay we saw a few chapters ago. Sometimes the content of the essays relate directly to the power plays and emotional development between C and Anya. And as the characters primarily write about their interactions with each other, we gain insight about them mainly through the eyes of others. J. M. Coetzee has closed the gap between writer and written product as we read a case study of a work in progress.

The essays themselves make for interesting reading. This style of essay, which is neither academic nor journalistic, is more akin to aphorisms, diatribes and bon mots. Many have no real conclusion and some possess no definite form. This most "literary" sub-genre of the literary essay is tiring if read alone, as the topics wander and the voice becomes droning. But when coupled with fiction, that which would be tiresome is now a light and welcome addition to the text. This is not to say that the essays have no value on their own. Many do and are insightful, if you can get past some of the more obvious, preaching-to-the-choir literary liberalism (guess what Coetzee says about Bush, Blair and modern higher education?).

In the midst of this literary game, C and Anya impact each other at distinctly different points in their lives. How much they change each other is one of the more fundamental questions with which we conclude. But at the end, we get little in the question of what this novel is actually about. While well written and inventive, what Coetzee is ultimately getting at remains regrettably unclear. Literary games are all well and good, but it felt somewhat empty. This may best have been remedied by lengthening the narratives and shortening the essays, as well as giving C more of a voice so as not to be drowned out by his essays or the other characters. While the minimalism is obviously intentional, the result is that C becomes less of a character and more of a device. This is a shame, since he could have been the perfect nuanced character to offset Anya's admittedly predictable development.

All in all, DIARY OF A BAD YEAR is a worthwhile read for those who enjoy playing with style and don't mind a certain lack of narrative depth. While the end product has some faults, the picture of the novel as a process of its own is handled capably by a stylist honed at his craft.

--- Reviewed by Max Falkowitz

Testament
Coetzee has always been interested in the intersection between fiction and politics. DISGRACE, his most famous novel, is a somewhat traditional story set in the specific political context of post-apartheid South Africa. His earlier WAITING FOR THE BARBARIANS, set in an unnamed place and time, uses fiction as a parable for political repression in almost any age, not least our own. But in his latest work, DIARY OF A BAD YEAR, Coetzee reverses this pattern; the book is frankly presented as a collection of political essays, with any fictional element confined to the footnotes. These essays return to the themes of BARBARIANS -- democracy and the nature of the state -- but now with specific reference to contemporary events such as waterboarding and Guantanamo. The story, such as it is, unspools in two separate bands of footnotes lower down on the page. One concerns the relationship between Coetzee and Anya, the woman (youngish, highly sexed) who is typing the manuscript for him; the other is a parallel narrative told by the typist, including her own relationship with her partner in the upstairs apartment. The theme of an older man's attraction to a young woman is also familiar from other Coetzee books, but I have to say that this particular example is rather uninvolving. The author never really gives Anya a distinctive voice -- though I am not sure that this is important to him.

Coetzee himself characterizes what the critics say of his recent work: "At heart he is not really a novelist at all, they say, but a pedant who dabbles in fiction." There is some truth in this, and he knows it. But that does not make the book dull. For one thing, as we know from his collection INNER WORKINGS, Coetzee is a superb essayist, and never boring. For another, the layout of the book in three parallel tracks makes for a very interesting dynamic in reading. Although the book is constructed in short chapters, the three strands seldom pause at the same time; there is always at least one thread pulling you forward. You find yourself changing your ways of reading, sometimes going down each page vertically in the usual way, sometimes reading one of the bands across several pages before going back to catch up on the others. And then you begin to find references from one of the levels recurring on another one many pages later; the three layers get out of synch, creating a fascinating pattern of past, present, and possibly future -- if a writer at the end of his creative life (as he sees himself) can be said to have a future.

This, I believe, is what concerns Coetzee most. The book reads as two drafts of a final testament written after a lifetime of thought. The first part (two thirds of the whole), entitled "Strong Opinions," supposedly consists of a manuscript the novelist is preparing for a German publisher, obiter dicta from a Nobel Prize guru. Hard-hitting thoughts, to be sure, but as Anya gradually makes him realize, they are also somewhat impersonal. In the final third, he starts a private diary, written for himself alone (though shared with Anya); these entries deal with emotions, dreams, the process of writing, music, and the afterlife. Does the novelist leave more to later generations by posing as a sage, or by constructing a fiction out of his inmost thoughts? He leaves us in no doubt that this is a construction. The further on we get in the story, the more we become aware of the author at work, contriving what we read. Of course Anya is not a real character; she is meant to be seen as an invention of the author's, a stalking horse, an implied critic, and an object of his erotic fantasy. The transparency is pathetic, really -- a kind of mental masturbation -- but it also lets us see much deeper inside the heart of this aging man than all the assurance of his opening polemic could ever do.