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Diary of a Bad Year

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Coetzee's latest novel sits in the 'old man lit' tradition, a small genre presided over mainly by the world's most elderly, most eminent male writers (Philip Roth at the forefront) who realize in their developing senescence that their life's work of masterful literary output, mantlepieces groaning with awards, and thousands of acolytes are scant consolation when the one thing they really want - to sleep with beautiful young women, is denied them due to the linear nature of time that withers all in the end.

The novel in keeping with late period Coetzee is a meta-fiction. An eminent 72 year old novelist living in Sydney, John C (a bit like the real JC) is asked by a German publisher to write a series of essays for an anthology entitled 'Strong Opinions' (clear Nabokovian overtones, I'm not sure why). The book is split into three sections. The top of each page contains the essays that John C writes take up about half the book: thoughtful, cerebral pieces from a liberal bent covering a multitude of current topics such as the nature of the state, the state of universities, the slaugher of animals (strong Coetzee territory), tourism, Tony Blair, you name it.

Running parallel to these essays are little itsy-bitsy slivers of novel proper, telling the story of John C encountering a sultry young woman in the laundry room of his apartment building and paying her to become his secretary to type up his manuscript. Things become complex as the woman, Anya, who is little more than a bimbo, tells her boyfriend Alan, an investment consultant, what she is up to. Ideologies and male egos clash as Alan and John C eye each other up suspiciously, each questioning the other's motives, leading to a messy entanglement.

Diary of a Bad year is an elegant, intellectual curiosity of a novel. It provides much to think about, and does capture many of the anxieties of people living in contemporary democracies. But there is rarely substantial meat for the reader to sink his or her teeth into. John C says at one point that writing a novel entails making like Atlas, holding an entire world on your shoulders, a task he no longer has the energy for. Perhaps the real John Coetzee feels the same. It looks as if his 1999 masterpiece 'Disgrace' will be the last novel proper we get from him, and now we must be satisfied with a mixture of essay and plays on the nature of fiction and writing. This book will, like Coetzee's two previous novels, Elizabeth Costello and Slow Man, appeal more to the reader who wants a challenging account of ideas and sexual desire rather than a good old fashioned story.

Short version: the opinions are intentionally pompous and banal. J.C. is not Coetzee.

Long version:

This is the third book in a series that began with Elizabeth Costello and continued with Slow Man. These books are fundamentally about being a writer who has won the Nobel Prize. Perhaps Coetzee keeps writing them because some people haven't yet figured out that his fictional characters' opinions are not his own; perhaps, as a writer already drowning in consciousness of tradition and context, he feels that these are the only sorts of books he can now write. I tell people when they read these books: remember that Coetzee has won the Nobel Prize, and think about what that means to him and what it means to people's opinions of him. In having this title thrust on him, he is no longer any old author, but a certain sort of elder statesman. And being the sort of writer he is, he cannot let that stand unquestioned. And since academics are still using the animal rights sections in Elizabeth Costello as though they were freestanding philosophical essays, Coetzee takes further steps in Diary of a Bad Year to make it clear that the "philosophy" in the book is hardly meant to be taken seriously as philosophy. Out goes Elizabeth Costello; in comes J.C., a Nobel Prize winning South African novelist now living in Australia, just like Coetzee, except dumber.

The structure of the novel, in brief: several voices, those of a writer, J.C.; his amanuensis and crush, a cosmopolitan Filipina named Anya; Anya's financier/scammer husband Alan; and most of all, the writings of J.C. as typed up by Anya. The writings are divided into two sections, one called "Strong Opinions," written for some sort of German literary publication, and later on, "Soft Opinions," written for Anya. Since these sections co-exist on each page, the book resists reading in an easy rhythm, as any attempt to read the three sections in parallel, especially early on, results in continual jarring shifts as the highfaluting tone of the "Strong Opinions" is undercut by J.C.'s earnest and vaguely creepy obsession with Anya and Anya's own sardonic detachment. In some ways it comes as a respite, as the "Strong Opinions"--on the War on Terror, on torture, on intelligent design, and on other urgent political issues of the day--quickly become unbearably pompous, banal, and irritating. They are filled with cliched homilies familiar to anyone who has read the New York Review of Books in the last seven years and dilettantish excursions into areas that J.C. knows nothing about. I winced when reading his "opinion" on Guantanamo Bay that begins:

"Someone should put together a ballet under the title Guantanamo, Guantanamo! A corps of prisoners, their ankles shackled together, thick felt mittens on their hands, muffs over their ears, black hoods over their heads, do the dances of the persecuted and desperate...In a corner, a man on stilts in a Donald Rumsfeld mask alternately writes at his lectern and dances ecstatic little jigs."

Had I read these opinions in a Philip Roth or John Updike book, I would take them at face value and discount the author accordingly. But Coetzee is too smart, and any comparison of the "Strong Opinions" to his real opinions in his thoughtful, careful essays makes the difference blindingly apparent. (It does take something approaching guts for a Nobel Laureate to write something so profoundly trite and irritating and attribute it to his own ostensible fictional proxy.) As with many literary intellectuals, J.C.'s excursions into math and science are particularly stupid. By the time J.C. writes, "I continue to find evolution by random mutation and natural selection not just unconvincing but preposterous as an account of how complex organisms come into being" and invokes Heisenberg without knowing what uncertainty even is, it's obvious that Coetzee has no wish even to defend thes opinions; he is making them transparently foolish so that readers examine the rhetoric rather than the opinions. Underneath the sanctimonious white male liberal pablum, including defenses of pornography, Adorno-esque cultural snobbery in indictments of rock music, latent sexism (captured especially well, complete with tired attack on Catherine MacKinnon), and sympathy with enemies of whom he knows nothing, there bleeds the personality that is revealed in J.C.'s internal voice lower on the page. With most would-be political commentators in the literati, it is not quite so obvious, but in J.C., Coetzee gives us tools for easily making the connection.

For it is Anya who carries the voice objecting to the "Strong Opinions." Alan picks up this critique later in a less sympathetic fashion, but it is Anya who connects J.C.'s emotional life with what he writes on the page. I felt great relief to hear her articulate my thoughts (and no doubt those of many other readers) when she politely tells J.C.:

"OK. This may sound brutal, but it isn't meant that way. There is a tone--I don't know the best word to describe it--a tone that really turns people off. A know-it-all tone. Everything is cut and dried: I am the one with all the answers, here is how it is, don't argue, it won't get you anywhere. I know that isn't how you are in real life, but that is how you come across, and it is not what you want. I wish you would cut it out. If you positively have to write about the world and how you see it, I wish you could find a better way."

So we lead to the real problem, which is J.C.'s impotence in the face of the current world horrors and the disastrous results of the obligation he feels to be relevant. As the book continues on and reveals J.C.'s ignorance of the world in several ways, Coetzee spares him little criticism, but does ultimately make a case for his real art in the form of the lovely, impressionistic "Soft Opinions," short lyrical reflections in the last half of the book that mercifully replace the "Strong Opinions." These vignettes are written with Anya in mind and with no attempt to be politically incisive. J.C. describes his dreams, his doubts, his age, his friends, and his passions, as antiquated and pedantic as they may be. Most of all, he makes no attempt to suppress the "I" out of the fear that he must pretend to be something he is not in order to address the world with urgency. There is some resignation in this shift, but also great relief; J.C.'s mask has fallen and he returns to himself. It puts him in correct proportion to the thoughtful but non-bookish Anya and her powerful but cowardly husband Alan, and the shift in tone allows him to have a visible, evident effect on Anya, one (it is implied) far greater than that of telling a bunch of would-be intellectual liberals what they already know and having them feel good about it because it's coming from a Nobel Prize winner.

Coetzee has always been interested in the intersection between fiction and politics. DISGRACE, his most famous novel, is a somewhat traditional story set in the specific political context of post-apartheid South Africa. His earlier WAITING FOR THE BARBARIANS, set in an unnamed place and time, uses fiction as a parable for political repression in almost any age, not least our own. But in his latest work, DIARY OF A BAD YEAR, Coetzee reverses this pattern; the book is frankly presented as a collection of political essays, with any fictional element confined to the footnotes. These essays return to the themes of BARBARIANS -- democracy and the nature of the state -- but now with specific reference to contemporary events such as waterboarding and Guantanamo. The story, such as it is, unspools in two separate bands of footnotes lower down on the page. One concerns the relationship between Coetzee and Anya, the woman (youngish, highly sexed) who is typing the manuscript for him; the other is a parallel narrative told by the typist, including her own relationship with her partner in the upstairs apartment. The theme of an older man's attraction to a young woman is also familiar from other Coetzee books, but I have to say that this particular example is rather uninvolving. The author never really gives Anya a distinctive voice -- though I am not sure that this is important to him.

Coetzee himself characterizes what the critics say of his recent work: "At heart he is not really a novelist at all, they say, but a pedant who dabbles in fiction." There is some truth in this, and he knows it. But that does not make the book dull. For one thing, as we know from his collection INNER WORKINGS, Coetzee is a superb essayist, and never boring. For another, the layout of the book in three parallel tracks makes for a very interesting dynamic in reading. Although the book is constructed in short chapters, the three strands seldom pause at the same time; there is always at least one thread pulling you forward. You find yourself changing your ways of reading, sometimes going down each page vertically in the usual way, sometimes reading one of the bands across several pages before going back to catch up on the others. And then you begin to find references from one of the levels recurring on another one many pages later; the three layers get out of synch, creating a fascinating pattern of past, present, and possibly future -- if a writer at the end of his creative life (as he sees himself) can be said to have a future.

This, I believe, is what concerns Coetzee most. The book reads as two drafts of a final testament written after a lifetime of thought. The first part (two thirds of the whole), entitled "Strong Opinions," supposedly consists of a manuscript the novelist is preparing for a German publisher, obiter dicta from a Nobel Prize guru. Hard-hitting thoughts, to be sure, but as Anya gradually makes him realize, they are also somewhat impersonal. In the final third, he starts a private diary, written for himself alone (though shared with Anya); these entries deal with emotions, dreams, the process of writing, music, and the afterlife. Does the novelist leave more to later generations by posing as a sage, or by constructing a fiction out of his inmost thoughts? He leaves us in no doubt that this is a construction. The further on we get in the story, the more we become aware of the author at work, contriving what we read. Of course Anya is not a real character; she is meant to be seen as an invention of the author's, a stalking horse, an implied critic, and an object of his erotic fantasy. The transparency is pathetic, really -- a kind of mental masturbation -- but it also lets us see much deeper inside the heart of this aging man than all the assurance of his opening polemic could ever do.

Once again, Coetzee delivers an innovative and readable novel on loneliness, friendship, and how small encounters shape our lives. He does so in readable and interesting way (the way in which he divided the pages worked for me as I found it to be easy to track the narrative).

Rosemary Ceravolo:
Diary of a Bad Year (Paperback)
by J.M. Coetzee
read in March, 2009

Rosemary said: "J. M. Coetzee's pseudo-novel,
"Diary of a Bad Year," is almost, but not really,
once you accept his 'concretismo' terms of writing,
irritating to read.

He sections off each page into three vantage
points of view by the three main characters.

The first section on the pages is the typed
manuscript of the author's, (thinly disguised
as Coetzee, himself), "Strong Opinions," comprising
all subjects from "01. -On the Origins of the State,"
through "24. -On Dostoevsky."

The second section on the pages is the voice of the
erotic, yet compassionate, downstairs neighbor, a
Filipina woman named Anya, whom the aging author
hires to type his manuscript.

The third section on each page concentrates on the
relationship Anya has with her live-in lover, Alan,
who gradually and predictably becomes jealously
obsessed with Anya's daily meetings with the famous,
old author upstairs. Alan tries unsuccessfully to
engage Anya in a plot to steal the old man's money.
Anya refuses to accomodate Alan's avaricious
greed and leaves him, once the manuscript is finished.
She winds up quite liberated after the experience of being
honored by the old author's attentions and his literary
works over the period of time she works for him.
Alan, by contrast, remains full of sour grapes, and can only
find fault with the author's work on every envious level
imaginable.

It took me awhile to enjoy the book. After all, I had just
read the epic masterpiece by Roberto Bolano, "2666," and
had to adjust my expectations to the different, more insular
and almost parable-like work of Coetzee in the "Diary of a
Bad Year." The three-tiered arrangement of the novel is
both clever and poignant, making clear the differences
among face-to-face communications, the exchanges behind one's
back, and the words that eventually wind up being published,
in German no less, without the back stories.

I found this book very powerful, contrary to some of the other reviews. The "split" essay/narrative form, which some have found unwieldy, is in fact appropriate for the story of an old man who has come to live solely in his mind and who suddenly finds himself troubled by desire, then love. It is also appropriate to the life-changing but limited nature of the relationship between the old man and the young woman. How much there can be to that relationship is very much limited by the vast difference in their ages (which, however, I think the young woman character could have overcome if she were really a "bimbo", as one reviewer declared), and so there is not enough "flesh" there (literally!) to fill up a novel which is just about their relationship.

On the other hand, a great deal does pass between these two, though sex does not. And while detailing their interaction the book manages to insidiously, as if by slight of hand, take us right up to the edge of the abyss that awaits the male character. It is frightening, sad and uplifting all at once--and, yes, even hopeful.

The old do not get much literature, despite the first-listed reviewer's distaste for what they do get via an occasional writer's big reputation. This one time the subject of elderliness and its discontents has gotten a large and fine airing, with a rather beautiful love story thrown in.

I'll grant that this book will appeal with special poigancy to old men, and much less to The Young. (When I was forced to read "Death in Venice" at the age of 19 I of course couldn't imagine what all the fuss was about either.) I think that many of The Old will find it exciting, funny, touching, suspenseful, and at last deeply truthful about the last path we all must walk. I don't see how more could be asked of a novel than that.

DIARY OF A BAD YEAR begins with an essay about the formation of the state and Hobbes's social contract. By the end of the page, the aging writer speaks for himself, and we meet the protagonist who is writing the essay. On page two we're back to the social contract, which goes on to lament that such thought is outdated. When was the last time that someone signed one of these contracts by free choice? Then we return to the narrator, who starts hungrily lusting after a sexy young tart in his apartment complex with whom he flirts awkwardly. A few chapters in, the girl, Anya, starts speaking for herself, and her loving talk about the shape of her rear begins the third narrative in DIARY OF A BAD YEAR.

The withered Senor C asks Anya to type his collection of essays, STRONG OPINIONS. Bored and between jobs, she agrees, fully aware (and reveling) that she is hired as eye candy. It's not like she needs the money: her boyfriend Alan --- a horny, insensitive, greedy I-banker who only wants Anya as a trophy --- gives her all the cash she needs so she may shop and look pretty for him.

So commences a chronicle of one man's literary process: the essays he writes, his conversations with Anya, and her criticism as well as private diary-esque side of the story. In this last part, a second plot develops: Alan seems obsessed with ruining C and stealing his money, and has developed an elaborate scheme to do so. It is here that Anya's personal growth shows, as she repeatedly defends the old man, someone she barely knows, from this hawk.

At its best, the novel is a web of interconnections: Anya provides her distinctly non-academic viewpoint on C's essays as she types them up, and so we read a discussion of an essay we saw a few chapters ago. Sometimes the content of the essays relate directly to the power plays and emotional development between C and Anya. And as the characters primarily write about their interactions with each other, we gain insight about them mainly through the eyes of others. J. M. Coetzee has closed the gap between writer and written product as we read a case study of a work in progress.

The essays themselves make for interesting reading. This style of essay, which is neither academic nor journalistic, is more akin to aphorisms, diatribes and bon mots. Many have no real conclusion and some possess no definite form. This most "literary" sub-genre of the literary essay is tiring if read alone, as the topics wander and the voice becomes droning. But when coupled with fiction, that which would be tiresome is now a light and welcome addition to the text. This is not to say that the essays have no value on their own. Many do and are insightful, if you can get past some of the more obvious, preaching-to-the-choir literary liberalism (guess what Coetzee says about Bush, Blair and modern higher education?).

In the midst of this literary game, C and Anya impact each other at distinctly different points in their lives. How much they change each other is one of the more fundamental questions with which we conclude. But at the end, we get little in the question of what this novel is actually about. While well written and inventive, what Coetzee is ultimately getting at remains regrettably unclear. Literary games are all well and good, but it felt somewhat empty. This may best have been remedied by lengthening the narratives and shortening the essays, as well as giving C more of a voice so as not to be drowned out by his essays or the other characters. While the minimalism is obviously intentional, the result is that C becomes less of a character and more of a device. This is a shame, since he could have been the perfect nuanced character to offset Anya's admittedly predictable development.

All in all, DIARY OF A BAD YEAR is a worthwhile read for those who enjoy playing with style and don't mind a certain lack of narrative depth. While the end product has some faults, the picture of the novel as a process of its own is handled capably by a stylist honed at his craft.

--- Reviewed by Max Falkowitz

I very much wanted to like Diary of a Bad Year. J.M. Coetzee is an extraordinary writer and thinker, and I so admired Disgrace. Instead, I found this work self-indulgent. He obviously put a great deal of thought and energy into the clever structure, but the work seemed to start from that platform and embark via semi-biographical wanderings to a somewhat predictable and ungratifying conclusion. I did appreciate the attempt to use the structure to show the evolution of thinking, the challenge of underlying assumptions and the balance among intellect, opinion and emotion. Anya and Alan, the characters created as foils to reflect Senor C's reassessment of his life, were more like inner voices of Mr. C than real characters that led him to question everything he stood for. This may be intentional, as all conversation is reported third-hand, and is all in the nature of musings, rather than dialogue.

Comparisons to Philip Roth seem inevitable, and I did not find that Coetzee matched up in this instance. There is so much self-deprecating humor in Roth's "old men." I did not appreciate the quirky humor in Diary of a Bad Year in the same way. In part, I think it is because it was so constrained by the three-voice format. I don't regret that I read Diary of a Bad Year, but I am hoping for much more from my next Coetzee read.

J.M. Coetzee's latest book is a 3-tiered work comprised of essays and a pair of dual narratives - all on the the same page - in 2 parts. Most of the book's content is devoted to the essays, known as Strong Opinions, and I advise reading all of the essays first, in both parts. Then read the middle-of-the-page section, in Part 1, which is narrated by a solitary, psuedo-JMCoetzee-type novelist who has written the above essays and is having them typed up by a young, attractive woman named Anya who lives in his building, in Sydney, Australia; his perception of their relationship is featured here. The bottom-of-the-page section is narrated by Anya, and concerns her take on "Senor C's" essays, and his attraction to her, and her overbearing boyfriend Alan's jealousy toward the situation - and sinister ideas to capitalize on it. In Part 2, the bottom (Anya) section should be read before the middle (Senor C) section, and the text sets the reader up for this.

The essays cover a number of topics and Coetzee has adopted the format of Montaigne or Bacon, giving them titles such as "On this" and "On that", etc,; however they are nowhere near as profound. Compelling at times, yes; but too often he writes banal pieces about contemporary politics and world events that would be more at home in the letters-to-the-editor pages, and editorials, of any newspaper than in a book written by a Nobel Prize winner. We readers deserve better. But he makes up for his nugatory essays with good ones about other writers and friends, concepts and story ideas.

The dual narratives work well together once you get a handle on the order in which to read them. Some of the essay topics are discussed, played out, and the vulnerability of both narrators and Anya's witless and devious boyfriend Alan builds toward a touching climax.

It's a book about honesty: the solitary writer trying to be honest with himself and the world he lives in, no matter the outcome, a struggle that seeps into the lives of the few people he comes in contact with.

Coetzee is a master at creating tension with very little material, and Diary of a Bad Year illustrates this. The three voices in this narrative are in constant play against each other, creating a thread of strain that is hard to snap. Coetzee juggles current events, sexual tension, and the fear of death onto one taut narrative.

The voices are preachy, perhaps. At times they strain credulity and sound very much the same, yet still Diary of a Bad year is difficult to put down. Coetzee gives us something new on each page.