Customer Reviews

Dusklands

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

This slim volume contains two superficially discreet narratives. Coetzee is once again brilliant. His form here is slightly experimental, and the prose does not display quite the crystalline exactitude found in "Disgrace", "Waiting for the Barbarians", "Age of Iron", or "The Life and Times of Michael K". Here he works in a softer vein, more like "Foe" or "In the Heart of the Country".

The content is classic Coetzee. Unflinching. Sometimes his clarity and realism lead me towards existential despair. But to emerge from any of his works is to emerge stronger, emboldened by the power of the brutally honest and righteous.

This book might be about passion and compassion. It is definitely an examination of human psychology, specifically how it is formed, informed, reformed, and deformed by fascistic social/political structures.

"Dusklands" is a fascinating read. It illuminates another facet (or two) of the human condition. It is deceptively quick light reading. Subtly profound while intellectually massive, it is a delicate jackhammer. It is so good, and so right, that it is out of print. Do what it takes to find a copy.

DUSKLANDS is Coetzee's first book, and it is in some significant ways different from some of his other works, though alike in others. It is a meditation on power, colonialism, the brutal meeting of cultures that occurs when imperialist goals are served and also a study of language, language's conveyance of power and propaganda as well as "self-propaganda" or delusion. It is more oblique in its themes and points, though, than even "In the Heart of the Country," I think.

The book is broken into two distinct sections. The first is a first-person narrative by an Amercian propagandist for a (government?) project about Vietnam and how the native people there can be influenced in favor of the invading army, the United States. The propagandist is an unhappy and an unappealing narrator. He has problems with his marriage, and the artfulness of his work is not respected by his superior, a fictional "Coetzee," who tells him that he needs to be plainer in language and subtler in idea for the military personnel who will read his assessment. The report is included in the narrative, and one can read the narrator's (who works in the field of "mythography") focus on cultural myth as a motivator and shaper of a people's beliefs and the outcomes of those beliefs (behaviors).

And so we must ask ourselves what is the mythology of the man who is writing this report? We see his eventual break with his routine and society by the end of this section, and his own mythology in his trying to heal that break in his own mind. Coetzee, the author, begs the question here of what the narrator's break has to do with the subject of his report, colonialism and its attendant propaganda, both public and "self," in Vietnam.

The second section of this slim book (125 pages), "The Narrative of Jacobus Coetzee," is the story of a Boer frontiersman in the 1700s who means to take revenge on the native people because they have slighted his superiority as a white man. This section has more of narrative plot line as we follow the journey and its outcome, but deals, again, with the themes of colonialism, power, cultural identity and communication. Given the insertion of the Coetzee character again in this section, I was left to wonder what this means? Is Coetzee saying he is heir to the imperialism of his ancestors? Is he saying we are indistinguishable as individuals if we inherit the benefits of the sin of colonialism? I don't know...

This was a more challenging read for me than I have found with other books by Coetzee, but it was very rewarding, especially now as our nation copes with the consequences of the means through which imperialism asserts itself in a globalizing world. I recommend this book, but not as a first look at Coetzee.

This book is very inspiring, very deep and very complex. I lked more "In the heart of the country".

By the way, the guy down here (writesbooksforfood) that rated it one star and barks against J L Borges (you can imagine) also rated another book: "How to improve your racquetball". You can imagine a guy that reads that kind of books, and later he goes and tries to enjoy Borges or Coetzee? My god.

"Dusklands" consists of two very different parts. In "The Vietnam Project", Mr Coetzee tells the story of Eugene Dawn, a specialist in psychological warfare whose task it is to establish a document called the Vietnam Project dealing with the so-called Phase IV of the Vietnam conflict in the years 1973-1974. To give his imagination a helpful impulse, Dawn carries with him photographs that will illustrate the report. They show gruesome scenes of the war like for example sergeant Clifford Houston copulating with a Vietnamese woman or two other sergeants, Berry and Wilson, posing with several severed Vietnamese heads as trophies. But soon Dawn is driven to breakdown and madness by the stress of this macabre project to win the war in Vietnam. After having been driven to a nearly fatal assault on his child Martin, Dawn is placed in an institution. The text closes with Dawn reflecting as follows: "I have high hopes of finding whose fault I am."
"The narrative of Jacobus Coetzee" is actually a translation from Afrikaans by J.M. Coetzee of a text published in 1762. It is the account of a hideous vengeance of a frontiersman on a tribe of Hottentots in South Africa.
Both Eugene Dawn in the 1970s and Jacobus Coetzee in the 1760s are dealers in death who claim their humanity and impressively express their feelings of guilt.

Coetzee's 'Dusklands' is composed by two totally different stories: the first one about the Vietnamese war and the second one about the destruction of a Hottentot village by a Dutch explorer.
The small thematic link between the two is the violent intrusion of foreigners into national (tribal) territories and affairs.

The original treatment of the two stories is also completely different. The 'Vietnam Project' is a psychological analysis, while the South African story is an excerpt of a diary relating the facts.
The 'Vietnam project' portraits a US Ministry of defence employee who works on a psychological warfare project for Vietnam, while in fact he is against the war. This schizophrenic situation and his guilty feelings turn into a depression.
The diary relates the conflict between an explorer and a Hottentot village which leads to a sadistic extermination of the inhabitants.
Both stories seem to be influenced by Freudian psychology, and the last one more specifically by Freud's 'Totem und Tabu'.

The writing becomes sometimes a 'text' in the manner of the French 'nouveau roman', a disastrous literary movement influenced by such conceptual deliriums as structuralism and linguistics. The results were cold and empty novels without deep feelings or distinctive social reality, a mere playing with words and esoteric symbols.

Coetzee's stories are certainly a worth-while read, but they don't attain a general human level, like e.g. the political novels of Ismail Kadare. They stay more or less pasted to the treated themes.

Dusklands strikes a minor note in J.M. Coetzee's works. His first "novel" it is really two long short stories combined into one volume. The first story "The Vietnam Project" is a clumsy work, trying to make the connection between the violence of the colonizer over the colonized, and violence closer to home, linking this chain of war from the perspective of an American researcher who goes mad.

The second work is a faux historical document called "The Narrative Life of Jacobus Coetzee" detailing the travels of (what we presume is) a Coetzee ancestor into a "Hottentot" region to hunt elephant in the early eighteenth century. The trip degenerates into senseless acts of violence and reprisal raids against the natives. In this story Coetzee is on firmer ground. The tale has more clarity and resonance than the first one; he is on firmer ground here writing about his Afrikaner past, even in a fictional form.

Later, Coetzee could tackle a subject like the Vietnam Project, but he was not up to it yet in this volume. Of course he would return to the colonial venue again, and to much greater effect in later novels.

These two short novels, one about a writer going through a messy divorce and the other about an 18th century frontiersman and the Hottentots he has to deal with, are tied together by the single act of violence on which their stories turn. Both stories involve the power their protagonists understand they wield, and their shaky hold on that power, over themselves, their dependents and the world they inhabit, and their ultimate succumbing to that power serves as both stories' climax.

The second story, "The Narrative of Jacobus Coetzee," is paced better than "Vietnam Project," but both stories are a little stilted and detached from themselves in places, which runs a little counter to the thrust of the stories themselves. Yes, that's nitpicking -- I recommend this short volume otherwise without reservation -- but having read his utterly amazing and fully realized novel "Disgrace," these two stories, his first published works, show a writer not yet at the height of his powers. Just know that, unlike the main characters in these two stories, J.M. Coetzee eventually gets there.

Being Coetzee's first work of fiction, Dusklands marks the signs of a debut work. It consists of two separate narratives set in different times and places, but united by a common theme of racist oppression. The first narrative is set in Vietnam, during the Vietnam War. The U.S. is shown as a colonial power and the Vietnamese are shown to be suffering under its attacks. The protagonist is a captain, who sees the `truth' and tries to convince the authorities to see it too, but predictably fails. Driven into frustration he kills his own son.
In the other narrative, a seventeenth century white explorer leads an expedition in the heart of the native territory. A petty incident is interpreted by him as an attack on the Empire and in a second attack he destroys the entire tribe, including his former servants.

The narratives are hard to read and it's not easy to keep track of events, especially if we compare it with other works of Coetzee. Language is obstructive at some places and the reader has certain difficulties in muddling through the text.

Coetzee's vehement anti-Americanism shows the fervor of 1970s and Coetzee's own youthful convictions. His leftist sympathies are clear and one feels that the parallels drawn between the apartheid regime of South Africa and the U.S. Government are forced and artificial.

First of all, the blacks have equal rights in the U.S. and the State does not discriminate against them. The apartheid regime had occupied the land of Africa, driven out the natives, killing indiscriminately and extirpating a lot of cultures and tribes. We have no such equivalent in Vietnam War. The U.S. did not kill innocent civilians. It did not displace people by transplanting American people on the Vietnamese land. It did not try to convert the natives.

Secondly, the Vietnam War was initiated by the Communists. Soviet Union and China were the clear aggressors. In a post-1945 world, they had blatantly tried to overrun a free country torturing and massacring thousands of locals who opposed the Communist invaders. The U.S. jumped in only to prevent another country becoming Communist. In the process, it saved Vietnam the pain of a nationwide cultural destruction, like of which China had to suffer during the Cultural Revolution. There were some tactical mistakes on the part of the U.S., but the Vietnam War was a Communist folly. The U.S. had to pay for a crime of communists. It was due to the heavily biased leftist media of the Cold War era, which through selective reporting turned the public opinion of Americans against their own country.

After failing to gain a foothold in Vietnam, KGB's main focus was to slander America in which it succeeded. Many of the journalists and academicians were on the payroll of the Communists; many others with humanist concerns were swept away in the mass hysteria of 1970s' anti-Americanism. Coetzee was one of such gullible humanists.
This work should be seen in this light; keeping in mind that the author had strong leftist sympathies and commitment when he wrote this work.

Collection of two separate novels, being what it is, Coetzee's first published book, shouldn't stand high in your exceptations. Author himself hasn't yet built his narrative style which often lead to confusing storytelling, often misleading reader and leving him on not-so-firm-ground of bad litterature. When I say bad i mean that it is involuntarilly bad (and what, you can say, was written bad in ones own will?), though I must confess, Vietnamese project is intelectually provoking, but lacks well developd charater with justified action. You shouldn't start with Coetzee on this book

Some of the absolute worst, most pretentious, emptiest, and most ultimately worthless drivel I have ever read. Jorge Luis Borges, regardless of all the idolatry that's been heaped upon him, had a surprising number of misses, and maybe nothing much to say. But I'll grant that he had a few high spots. Not this guy. Very derivative and disappointing stuff...I'll go elsewhere for literary thrills.