It looks more into the genealogical background of its subject-his childhood, education, dealings with publishers, and censors-and pays cursory attention to the manuscripts.
To draw a distinction between his biography and the one John Kannemeyer published in 2012, Attwell points out that Kannemeyer’s attention was trained on Coetzee’s life rather than the work. Coetzee and the Life of Writing, Attwell sets out to write a critical biography of the novelist.
David Attwell has called Doubling the Point an intellectual autobiography of Coetzee. Interspersed between these interviews are some of Coetzee’s early literary essays and social critiques. The interviews cover each of Coetzee’s first five books- Duskland (1974), In the Heart of the Country (1977), Waiting for the Barbarians (1980), Life and Time of Michael K (1983), and Foe (1986). Attwell is a well-known Coetzee scholar and the author of several other books on the novelist’s work, the best known perhaps is Doubling the Point, a collection of early interviews with Coetzee-before the latter won two Booker Prizes and received the Nobel Prize for Literature (2003). Coetzee what Boswell was to Johnson, if a man as private and reclusive as Coetzee could have such a person in this life.
Coetzee and Arabella Kurtz, a clinical psychologist at the University of Leicester, hold a long-distance dialogue on the nature of truth in fiction and in clinical settings, and whether anything we write or speak can be true.ĭavid Attwell is to J. Coetzee and the Life of Writing, writer David Attwell gives each of the novels a biographical reading, addressing the authorship that underlines them, “its creative process and sources, its oddities and victories.” In The Good Story, J. Coetzee’s career, and it’s autobiography that links the two books up for review. It’s easy to say that autobiography and its attendant issues have played large roles in J. Both forms press forward to achieve what he calls a “higher truth” by choosing facts that support an “evolving purpose.” More recently, in his current book, The Good Story (2015), he’ll take it a step further by saying when two people tell each other in conversation their life stories, it is little more than an exchange of fictions that occurs. For Coetzee there’s little difference between autobiography and fiction. Coetzee boldly tells interviewer David Attwell that “all writing is autobiography: everything that you write, including criticism and fiction, writes you as you write it.” Coetzee continues by saying that when you tell the story of your life, you do so “from a reservoir of memories,” selecting those bits of narrative that get to a plausible truth. In Doubling the Point (1994), novelist J.
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