Product Description

Coetzee explores the work of twentieth century German literature’s greatest writers, an essay on Graham Greene’s Brighton Rock and on the short fiction of Samuel Beckett. American literature is also strongly represented and Coetzee rounds off the collection with essays on three fellow Nobel laureates.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #2375696 in Books
• Published on: 2007-03-27
• Released on: 2007-03-27
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 256 pages

From Booklist
In his second volume of literary essays, following Stranger Shores (2001), Nobel laureate Coetzee conducts deep readings primarily of major twentieth-century European and American writers. Cosmopolitan in range and erudite in texture, Coetzee's biocritical explications delve into the art, times, and humanity of, among others, Italo Svevo, Robert Musil, Paul Celan, Gunter Grass, Graham Greene, and W. G. Sebald. As a South African expat, Coetzee is attuned to literature under pressure as writers write in lands other than home, contending with language gaps and facing a world in violent upheaval. In his American essays, Coetzee brings an unusual perspective to Walt Whitman's eroticism, Faulkner's vision of the South, Philip Roth's Plot against America, and Arthur Miller's screenplay for The Misfits. In each case, Coetzee tells a story as much as he interprets the work, riding in the slipstream of his subject's life and writings as he parses matters personal, technical, aesthetic, moral, and political with both subtlety and vigor. Coetzee's profound fascination with the clarity and mystery of literature reaffirms its significance. Seaman, Donna

Review
“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


From the Trade Paperback edition.

About the Author
J.M. Coetzee’s work includes Waiting 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.


From the Trade Paperback edition.

Customer Reviews

Occasional Thoughts on Literature
"Inner Workings" represents a collection of J.M. Coetzee's literary essays from 2000-2005. The majority, even those on important figures, are little more than book reviews or occasional work; they are almost never "critical" in either sense of the term. Coetzee's usual approach is to provide a general summary of the book under consideration, an overview of the author's life story, and a brief concluding remark that is more often than not laudatory or so gnomic as to hardly provide any literary perspective. That being said there is a great deal to be learned from this volume, especially in regard to the Central European authors who either influenced Kafka or were influenced by him. A majority of these authors were Jewish and Coetzee comprehensively discusses the manner in which their lives were compromised either through surrender to the majoritarian culture or through outright physical annihilation. The roster of middle European authors includes Italo Svevo, Robert Walser, Robert Musil, Walter Benjamin (a fine essay), Bruno Schulz, Joseph Roth, and (by extension)Paul Celan; an essay on Franz Kafka would have been a logical inclusion. Coetzee is very good on the hazards of translation, especially in regard to German-speaking writers. The second area of emphasis is on post-World War II American and English authors like Graham Greene, Beckett, Faulkner, Bellow, Arthur Miller and Philip Roth. He takes Roth's measure accurately and his love of Bellow as perhaps the greatest writer of his generation is evident. As a poet I especially enjoyed his explications of Celan and Whitman. His essay on Gabriel Garcia Marquez is somewhat dismissive, critiquing "Memories of My Melancholy Whores" as an updating and apologia for "Love in The Time of Cholera", the brilliance of which he severely underestimates. Of most of his opinions there is little to argue with; whether we read these writers with more intelligence because of what he himself has written is subject to dispute. At times it seems as if he writes only to acknowledge his fellow Nobel Laureates but he does manage to humanize them, and for that we can be grateful.

That German Influence
Coetzee, whose background is Dutch, lives in Australia. He is known, of course, as a South African, but his roots belong to Europe. He has an affinity for the hard, dense German authors and writes about them well. As in his other collected essays, he likes to talk about translators and their work. Clearly, he has the expertise to do so. His close readings of Celan's poetry and of Kafka's prose give one an insight into his mental processes, which are exacting. Unlike Sontag, for example, one doesn't always come away excited to read further; instead one feels duty-bound to do so. I especially appreciated his essay on Arthur Miller's "The Misfits," which is an often ignored masterpiece of John Huston. He offers appraisals of Robert Walser, Robert Musil, Walter Benjamin, and other modern masters of the German-speaking world. These, too, are Sontag's favorites. On Americans such as Saul Bellow and Philip Roth, he covers familiar territory, but seems to have no feeling for their humor. He faults Bellow for not doing more with philosophy, which may be fair, but doesn't touch sufficiently on the development of his comic genius. In my view, Sontag writes a better essay, while Coetzee writes far superior fiction.

Magisterial
This bundle of essays contains superb reviews of important authors and (part of) their work.
Hereafter, a brief summary of Coetzee's comments and evaluations, with a few remarks.

Italo Svevo considered himself as a peer, a fellow researcher of Freud into the grip of the unconscious on conscious life.
Robert Musil (Young Törless) was skeptical of the power of reason to guide human conduct.
Robert Walzer (Jakob von Gunten) considered himself as a `Man von Unten' (an underdog).
Bruno Schulz's book `Cinnamon Shops' is a recreation of childhood consciousnesses, full of terror, obsessions and crazy glories.
Joseph Roth's `The Radetzky March' is a great poem of elegy to Habsburg Austria.
Sándor Márai considered himself as a dupe of history. He behaved like a caricature of the bourgeois intellectual, scorning the rabble of the right and the left.
Günter Grass's `Crabwalk' should be considered a breakthrough, as war crimes against Germans during WW II are not taboo anymore.
Graham Greene's `Brighton Rock' is a confrontation between religious Good and Evil and materialist right and wrong.
For Saul Bellow, literature is an interpretation of the chaos of life.
Philip Roth's `The Plot against America' paints a vision of a world based on hatred and suspicion, a world of them and us.
Nadine Gordimer's `The Pickup' is a dismissal of the false gods of the West, the gods of market capital.
Gabriel García Márquez's so-called magic realism is simply a matter of telling hard-to-believe stories.
For V.S. Naipaul, self-denial is the road of weakness.
J.M. Coetzee pierces the veil of Walt Whitman's amativeness. Whitman's democracy is a civic religion energized by a broadly erotic feeling.
J.M. Coetzee gives brilliant comments on translation problems for hermetic poetry (Paul Celan). Hermetic poetry seems to be mostly, as it is here, more puzzle work than poetry.
I only disagree with the author's review of Samuel Beckett's work. Here I side with another Nobel Prize winner, Naguib Mahfuz (Adrift on the Nile).

This book is a must read for all lovers of world literature. Of course, one should read most of the books reviewed in these essays.