AustLit

Coetzee's outstanding position within contemporary literature may be put down to an apparently conflicting intellectual stance. Coetzee, for one thing, has always cherished a transpersonal (if not metaphysical) category of truth: "We are born", he writes in 1992. "with the idea of the truth' (DP 395). Brought up in a South-African society with racist and various other sociocultural forms of discrimination, a sensitive liberal such as Coetzee must be accurate when it becomes inevitable to draw boundaries and assign responsibility. On account of his colonial heritage. with Polish and German forbears, an Afrikaans family (and an Anglo-American sense of values),Coetzee is related more to the perpetrators than the victims. Under the apartheid-regime he was forced to cope with the pailful distortion of the truth through state censorship, while his extensive reading of 19th'century Russian moralists had a formative influence on his unwavering moral outlook which presupposes knowledge of what is true or false, right or wrong.' (Introduction)