topics: |  essays | literature | autobiography

South Africa looms large, with essays on Nadine Gordimer, Alan Paton and
Helen Suzman, the Xhosa tribe, and the undeclared politics of the 1995 Rugby
World Cup. There is also a clutch of pieces on the art of translation,
particularly from German. Mr Coetzee refuses to commit himself to a theory of
translation, offering instead his elegantly evasive formulation that
"translating  text becomes part of the process of finding -- and making --
its meaning; translating turns out to be only a more intense and more
demanding form of what we do whenever we read" (p.70) - Economist

Twenty-six pieces on books and writing, all but one previously
published. Stranger Shores opens with "What is a Classic?" in which Coetzee
explores the answer to his own question-"What does it mean in living terms to
say that the classic is what survives?"-by way of T. S. Eliot, Johann
Sebastian Bach and Zbigniew Herbert. His subjects range from the great
eighteenth and nineteenth century writers Daniel Defoe, Samuel Richardson and
Ivan Turgenev, to the great German modernists Rilke, Kafka, and Musil, to the
giants of late twentieth century literature, among them Harry Mulisch, Joseph
Brodsky, Jorge Luis Borges, Salman Rushdie, Amos Oz, Naguib Mahfouz, Nadine
Gordimer, and Doris Lessing.

coetzeeStranger-Shoresshapiro-nyt01sep:
   His fourth collection of essays, following "White Writing," "Doubling the
Point" and "Giving Offense." Coetzee is that rare breed, an academic who
is also a world-class writer, and this latest collection is informed as much
by the novelist's keen eye as it is by the theorist's obsessions.
   These are not puff pieces. In the 26 essays included here -- concentrating on
major 20th-century authors like Franz Kafka, Joseph Brodsky, Jorge Luis
Borges, Salman Rushdie, A. S. Byatt, Naguib Mahfouz, Doris Lessing and Nadine
Gordimer -- Coetzee wields a sharp scalpel, carefully exposing the stylistic
flaws, theoretical shortcuts and, on occasion, bad faith of writers he
otherwise admires. It's a dazzling if at times coldly clinical
performance. Coetzee is roused less by aesthetic concerns than by political
and moral ones: when intellectual premises are muddled -- even when motivated
by the best of liberal intentions -- writing can be dangerous.
   What's at stake for Coetzee in this title, and by extension in this entire
collection, becomes clearer in the opening essay, "What Is a Classic?" His
title echoes the one T. S. Eliot used in a famous lecture presented to the
Virgil Society in the war-torn London of 1944. Eliot has been whittled down
to size in recent years, but he has never been dissected so thoroughly as he
is here. Coetzee has little patience for the way in which this American
expatriate, through "a diffidence concealing ruthless singleness of
purpose," has "made himself into the deliberately magisterial voice" of
London and of imperial Europe. Coetzee shows how Eliot's desperation to
recreate himself as something he was not is inseparable from his "attempt to
give a certain historical backing to a radically conservative political
program for Europe."
   Coetzee demands as much of his readers as he does of the authors he writes
about. There's no introduction in "Stranger Shores" to explain the
rationale behind the collection, the unusual arrangement of its contents or
even the significance of its title. In all likelihood, the title is lifted
from an obscure poem by Rudyard Kipling, "The Song of the Banjo," a poem
that must rankle Coetzee not only for celebrating the exploits of white
colonialists but for depicting poetry as imperialism's accomplice, the
"war-drum of the White Man round the world": "In desire of many marvels
over sea, / Where the new-raised tropic city sweats and roars, / I have
sailed with Young Ulysses from the quay / Till the anchor rumbled down on
stranger shores." Kipling (who himself lifted the phrase "stranger shores"
from Chapman's translation of Homer) recasts Ulysses as the prototypical
colonialist rather than a man who simply wants to get back home.

- Daniel Defoe is an author eclipsed by one of his creations (Robinson Crusoe).
- The `Four Quartets' of T.S. Eliot are an attempt to give a historical
	backing for a radical conservative program for a Europe of
	nation-states with the Catholic Church as the principal supranational
	organization.
- Samuel Richardson's `Clarissa' is a fight on two fronts. A social one:
	Clarissa is a member of a powerful family and bringing her down would
	bring down her family. A gender one: the virtue in women is not proof
	against the traitorous sexual desire which a skilful seducer can
	arouse.
- Cees Nooteboom is an intelligent traveler, but nevertheless part of the
	tourism industry.
- In `A posthumous confession', Marcellus Emants turns a confession of a
	worthless life into a work of art.
- R.M. Rilke's doctrine excuses all sins except those against Art.
- F. M. Dostoevsky conducts a searching interrogation of the `Reason of the
	Enlightenment'.
- The eccentric J. Brodsky elevates prosody to metaphysical status. He
	despairs of politics and looks to literature for redemption.
- For J.L. Borges, the poetic imagination enables the writer to join the
	universal creative principle. This principle has the nature of Will
	rather than Reason (Schopenhauer).
- Amos Oz escapes the intolerance and intransigence which have marred the
	public face of Israel.
- N. Mahfouz's main concern is to link private virtue with civic justice.
- D. Lessing explores the mystery of the self and the destiny it elects.
- For N. Gordimer, the artist has a special calling. His art tells a truth
	transcending the truth of history. The goal of art is to transform
	society and reunite what has been put asunder.
- B. Breytenbach's credo is to be against the norm, hegemony, the State and power.

These formidable essays contain also comments on the problems of translation
(F. Kafka) and the media (the camera has no ideology: it will lie on behalf
of whoever points it and presses the button.
    Africa - a continent abused, exploited and patronized by foreigners - is
still in the aftershock of colonialism. It is now confronted with hard
choices between economic stagnation coupled with a fast rising birth rate or
un-African Western science and technology, rationalism, materialism, the
profit motive, the cult of the individual and the nuclear family.