AustLit
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y
Waiting for the Barbarians
London
:
Secker and Warburg
,
1980
6303247
1980
single work
novel
'How do you eradicate contempt, especially when that contempt is founded on nothing more substantial than differences in table manners, variations in the structure of the eyelid? Shall I tell you what I sometimes wish? I wish that these barbarians would rise up and teach us a lesson, so that we would learn to respect them.
After twenty years of peacefully running one of the Empire’s settlements, a magistrate takes pity on an enemy barbarian who has been tortured. He enters into an awkward intimate relationship with her, and then is himself imprisoned as an enemy of the state.
Waiting for the Barbarians is a disturbing political fable about oppression, the fraught desire for reparation, and about living with a troubled conscience under an unjust regime.'
Source: Publisher's blurb.
Før barbarene kommer Oslo : J. W. Cappelens Forlag , 1983 -
y
Life & Times of Michael K
Johannesburg
:
Ravan Press
,
1974
6181890
1974
single work
novel
(taught in 2 units)
"From the author of Waiting for the Barbarians, another startling and disturbing portrait of today's South Africa, a land and a people beset by violence and siege. Coetzee here tells the story of a handicapped young man who has worked as a municipal gardener in Cape Town. His mother is dying, and she wishes to return to her birthplace out in the veldt. Without the required transit passes, mother and son set out on a journey that will end in death for her and in a new but temporary life on an abandoned farm for him. His respite in isolation and peace does not last long, however; grotesque reality soon returns to trouble this quiet new world. Against the solitude of this private drama, Coetzee paints an eloquent and pained picture of his homeland and of the bureaucrats, doctors, army deserters, and camp guards who reveal the stress and qualms of their existence and who uneasily sense that there is no conclusion to their troubles and no future for their lives." (Source: Libraries Australia)
Michael K : hans liv og tid Oslo : J. W. Cappelens Forlag , 1984 - y In the Heart of the Country London : Secker and Warburg , 1977 6204795 1977 single work novel I det mørke landet Oslo : J. W. Cappelens Forlag , 1985
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y
Foe
London
:
Secker and Warburg
,
1986
6180940
1986
single work
novel
(taught in 1 units)
'In the early eighteenth century, a woman finds herself set adrift from a mutinous ship and cast ashore on a remote desert island. There she finds shelter with its only other inhabitants: a man named Cruso and his tongueless slave Friday. In time, she builds a life for herself as Cruso's companion and, eventually, his lover.' (Source: Libraries Australia)
Foe Oslo : J. W. Cappelens Forlag , 1987 -
y
The Master of Petersburg
London
:
Secker and Warburg
,
1994
6204024
1994
single work
novel
In the fall of 1869 Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky, lately a resident of Germany, is summoned back to St. Petersburg by the sudden death of his stepson, Pavel. Half crazed with grief, stricken by epileptic seizures, and erotically obsessed with his stepson's landlady, Dostoevsky is nevertheless intent on unraveling the enigma of Pavel's life. Was the boy a suicide or a murder victim? Did he love his stepfather or despise him? Was he a disciple of the revolutionary Nechaev, who even now is somewhere in St. Petersburg pursuing a dream of apocalyptic violence? As he follows his stepson's ghost - and becomes enmeshed in the same demonic conspiracies that claimed the boy - Dostoevsky emerges as a figure of unfathomable contradictions: naive and calculating, compassionate and cruel, pious and unspeakably perverse. (Source: Libraries Australia)
Mesteren fra petersburg Oslo : Cappelen Damm , 1995 -
y
Disgrace
London
:
Secker and Warburg
,
1999
6173241
1999
single work
novel
(taught in 11 units)
After years teaching Romantic poetry at the Technical University of Cape Town, David Lurie, middle-aged and twice divorced, has an impulsive affair with a student. The affair sours; he is denounced and summoned before a committee of inquiry. Willing to admit his guilt, but refusing to yield to pressure to repent publicly, he resigns and retreats to his daughter Lucy's isolated smallholding. For a time, his daughter's influence and the natural rhythms of the farm promise to harmonise his discordant life. But the balance of power in the country is shifting. He and Lucy become victims of a savage and disturbing attack which brings into relief all the faultlines in their relationship.' (Publisher's blurb)
Vanære Oslo : Cappelen Damm , 2000 -
y
Boyhood : Scenes from Provincial Life
London
:
Secker and Warburg
,
1997
6309688
1997
single work
novel
Coetzee has been reluctant to talk about himself. Now, revisiting the South Africa of a half century ago, he writes about his childhood and his own interior life. Boyhood's young narrator grew up in a new development north of Cape Town, tormented by guilt and fear. With a father he did not respect, and a mother he both adored and resented, he led a double life - at school the brilliant and well-behaved student, at home the princely despot, always terrified of losing his mother's love. His first encounters with literature, the awakenings of sexual desire, and a growing awareness of apartheid left him with baffling questions; and only in his love of the veld ("farms are places of freedom, of life") could he find a sense of belonging. Bold and telling, this masterly evocation of a young boy's life is the book Coetzee's many admirers have been waiting for, but never could have expected (Source: Libraries Australia).
Barndom Oslo : J. W. Cappelens Forlag , 2002 -
y
Elizabeth Costello : Eight Lessons
Milsons Point
:
Knopf
,
2003
Z1064567
2003
single work
novel
(taught in 3 units)
In Elizabeth Costello: Eight Lessons, the eponymous protagonist is a retired author of international literary acclaim, who now spends her time giving guest lectures and interviews at scholarly events around the world. Old age has loosened, rather than reified, her ethical and literary convictions, and swelled her emotional reserves; rather than provide the staid academic wisdom expected of her, Costello offers provocative, unsettling opinions on issues such as animal rights, literary censorship, and the nature of belief - opinions she may or may not believe in herself. Profoundly aware of itself, Coetzee's novel is about human morality and mortality, but above all, about literature itself and the ethical responsibilities of writers and readers.
Elizabeth Costello : åtte leksjoner Oslo : J. W. Cappelens Forlag , 2004 - y Slow Man Milsons Point : Knopf , 2005 Z1209346 2005 single work novel Paul Rayment is on the threshold of a comfortable old age when a calamitous cycling accident results in the amputation of a leg. Humiliated, his body truncated, his life circumscribed, he turns away from his friends. He hires a nurse named Marijana, with whom he has a European childhood in common: hers in Croatia, his in France. Tactfully and efficiently she ministers to his needs. But his feelings for her, and for her handsome teenage son, are complicated by the sudden arrival on his doorstep of the celebrated Australian novelist Elizabeth Costello, who threatens to take over the direction of his life and the affairs of his heart. (Publisher's blurb) Langsom mann Oslo : Cappelen Damm , 2006