AustLit

'Nobel Laureate J. M. Coetzee reaffirms his place as one of the English language's most acclaimed authors with this fascinating examination of life, death and animals.

'These six stories by Nobel-Prize-winning J. M. Coetzee remind us that he is a writer whose language explores moral and emotional quandaries, often with wry humour. In the lead story, 'The Pole', set in Spain, concert pianist Witold attempts to play out a romantic fantasy with local music devotee Beatriz, who is considerably younger and whose marriage has gone cold. In person and in their correspondence, he is persistent, she resistant, but curious. It doesn't end quite as she might have imagined.

'The redoubtable character of Elizabeth Costello, now in her seventies, appears in four stories, engaging in philosophical discussions about death, motherhood and ethics with her adult children, in particular her son John. In the last story, 'The Dog', a young woman confronts a vicious dog- '"Curse you to hell!" she says. Then she mounts her bicycle and sets off up the hill.' (Publication summary)

'Let us suppose that I am the heir of an enormous estate. Stories about my generosity abound. And let us suppose that you are a young man, ambitious but in trouble with the authorities in your native land. You make a momentous decision: you will set out on a voyage across the ocean that will bring you to my doorstep, where you will say, I am here—feed me, give me a home, let me make a new life!' (Introduction)

'AFTER The Childhood of Jesus and The Schooldays of Jesus, J. M. Coetzee completes his trilogy with a new masterwork, The Death of Jesus.

'David loves to kick a soccer ball with his friends in Estrella. His father, Simón, and Bolívar the dog usually watch. His mother, Inés, works in a fashion boutique.

'David still asks lots of questions. In dancing class, he dances as he chooses. He refuses to do sums and the only book he will read is Don Quixote.

'One day, Julio Fabricante, the director of a nearby orphanage, invites David and his friends to form a proper soccer team. David decides to leave Simón and Inés and live with Julio. Before long he succumbs to a mysterious illness. Will he have time to deliver his ‘message’?

'In The Death of Jesus, J. M. Coetzee continues to explore the meaning of a world brimming with questions.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

'Dear Norma,

'I am writing from San Juan, from the one and only hotel here. I visited Mother this afternoon—a half-hour drive along a tortuous road. Her condition is as bad as I had feared, and worse. She cannot walk without her stick, and even then she is very slow. She has not been able to climb the stairs since returning from the hospital. She sleeps on the sofa in the living room. She tried to have her bed shifted downstairs, but the men said it had been built in situ, could not be moved without being taken to pieces first. (Didn’t Penelope have a bed like that—Homer’s Penelope?)' (Introduction)

'Crossing J.M. Coetzee's range of well-known writerly interests, including Beckett, with essays on Australian writers including Gerald Murnane, Patrick White and Les Murray.The subjects covered range from Daniel Defoe in the early eighteenth century to Coetzee's contemporary Philip Roth. Coetzee has had a long-standing interest in German literature and here he engages with the work of Goethe, Holderlin, Kleist and Walser. There are four fascinating essays on fellow Nobel laureate Samuel Beckett. There are essays too on Tolstoy's great novella The Death of Ivan Ilyich, on Flaubert's masterpiece Madame Bovary, and on the Argentine modernist Antonio Di Benedetto. J.M. Coetzee, a great novelist himself, is a wise and insightful guide to these works of international literature that span three centuries.' (Publication Summary)

'When 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. Simón and Inés take care of him in their new country. He is learning the language; he has begun to make friends. He has the big dog Bolívar to watch over him. But he’ll be seven soon. He should be at school. And so David is enrolled in the Academy of Dance in Estrella. 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.'

'The Schooldays of Jesus, the startling sequel to J. M. Coetzee’s widely praised The Childhood of Jesus, will beguile its readers. With the mysterious simplicity of a fable, it tells a story that raises the most direct questions about life itself.' (Source: Text Publishing website)

'A fascinating dialogue on the human inclination to make up stories between a Nobel Prize-wining writer and a psychotherapist.

'The Good Story is an exchange between a great writer with a long-standing interest in human psychology and a distinguished psychotherapist who has long been passionate about literature.

'Arabella Kurtz and J.M. Coetzee consider psychotherapy and its wider social context from different perspectives, but at the heart of both their approaches are language and story. Working alone, the writer is in sole charge of the story he or she tells. The therapist collaborates with the patient on the story of their life. Are they seeking an absolute truth or a fiction that will help the patient to overcome their distress?

'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 several generations back have to be accommodated into the national story. They draw on the work of great writers like Cervantes and Dostoevsky as well as canonical writers on psychoanalysis such as Freud and Melanie Klein. Their discussion provides an illuminating insight into the stories we tell of our lives.' (Publication summary)

'J.M. Coetzee’s screenplay versions of In the Heart of the Country and Waiting for the Barbarians are original and as yet unproduced cinematic adaptations of his novels. For readers familiar with Coetzee’s writing career spanning more than 40 years, the screenplays, published for the first time in this volume, are thus an unusual and unexpected addition to the oeuvre.' (Publisher's summary)

Extract from The Good Story : Exchanges on Truth, Fiction and Pschoanalytic Psychotherapy, by J. M. Coetzee and Arabella Kurtz, to be published by Harvill Secker in May 2015.