Diary of a Bad Year (Hardcover)

by J. M. Coetzee (Author)
Key Phrases: United States, South Africa, David Hicks (more...)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly
Nobelist Coetzee's 19th book features a stand-in for himself: Señor C, a white 72-year-old South African writer living in Australia who has written Waiting for the Barbarians. C falls into a metaphysical passion for his sexy 29-year-old Filipina neighbor, Anya, and quickly plots to spend more time with her by offering her a job as his typist. C's latest project is a series of political and philosophical essays, and Coetzee divides each page of the present novel in three: any given page features a bit of an essay (often its title and opening paragraph) at the top; C's POV in the middle; and Anya's voice at the bottom. C's opinions in the essays are mostly on the left (he despises Bush, Blair & Co., and is opposed to the Iraq War) and they bore Anya, who wants something less lofty. Meanwhile, Anya's lover, Alan—a smart, conservative 42-year-old investment consultant who's good in the sack, and who stands for everything C despises—becomes increasingly scornful and jealous, and eventually concocts an elaborate plan to defraud C. of money. Unfortunately, Anya is little more than a trophy to be disputed, and Alan as an unscrupulous, boorish reactionary is a caricature. While C's essays, especially the later ones inspired by Anya, hold some interest, this follow-up to Slow Year is not one of Coetzee's major efforts. (Jan.)
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From The Washington Post

Reviewed by Louis Begley

J.M. Coetzee is a great novelist, perhaps the greatest writing today, and has garnered just about every important prize awarded for fiction written in English, including the Nobel Prize for Literature. By common consent his most powerful work is Disgrace, published in 1999, in form an old fashioned realistic novel that one can readily imagine having been written by Dostoevsky, Coetzee's acknowledged master, if the terrifying event at the center of its plot -- the gang rape of a young lesbian in the South African bush -- were transposed to Russia during one of its periods of violence and chaos. Coetzee's previous novels, Waiting for the Barbarians (1980), Age of Iron (1990) and The Master of Petersburg (1994) among them, are likewise in the realist tradition. They are stories plausible enough for the reader to accept them as true. To quote the protagonist of Coetzee's new novel, Diary of a Bad Year, such stories "tell themselves, they don't get told." The author doesn't intrude in the space between the version of reality he has created and the reader, or otherwise take the risk of breaking the spell he has cast.

Since Disgrace, however, Coetzee has been engaged in a fascinating effort to bend the realist novel into a new medium. Diary of a Bad Year is the most recent example of that enterprise; the mesmerizing and beautiful novel Elizabeth Costello (2003) was the first. In the latter work Coetzee introduced an alter ego, a famous female writer, born in 1928, and the author of nine novels, a volume of poems, a book on birds and a body of journalism -- an oeuvre closely corresponding to Coetzee's. We see her deliver seven lectures. Among them: one on the novel, two on animal rights (these were in fact given by Coetzee at Princeton) and one on Eros as it affects men and gods. The last chapter is a retelling of the parable of the Law in Kafka's Trial.

Elizabeth Costello came back on stage, as though to take a bow, in an exquisite chapter-length sequel to the novel that appeared in 2005 in the New York Review of Books, and again, much more substantially, in the novel Slow Man, also published that year. There Costello literally moves in with the protagonist, a 60-something man by the name of Rayment, living alone in Adelaide, Australia. Rayment had never met Costello before, and she is not a welcome or easy guest. But she is obsessed with him, and the difficulty she faces is that he won't cooperate. He refuses to undertake anything that makes the protagonist of a novel photogenic, such as making love to the three women who are in all likelihood available or, for that matter, Costello herself. Slow Man -- with its slow protagonist -- can be seen as a novelist's interaction with the characters of a novel that is still a work in progress and may not turn out as had been intended.

The obduracy of invented characters can be very real. The novelist comes across them somewhere in the zone of imagination and, because of a mysterious affinity, invites them to come aboard. They do -- and misbehave. Coetzee's surrogate in Diary of a Bad Year is JC (two of Coetzee's initials), another very distinguished novelist but this time originally South African, laden with honors, born in 1934 (Coetzee was born in 1940), and now living in Sydney (Coetzee, like Rayment, lives in Adelaide). Asked why he isn't writing a novel instead of the string of little essays to be published in Germany as "Strong Opinions," JC answers, "I don't have the endurance any more. To write a novel you have to be like Atlas, holding up the whole world on your shoulders and supporting it there for months and years while its affairs work themselves out. It is too much for me as I am today."

JC and Coetzee may be protesting too much. Diary of a Bad Year is an ingenious work that rivets the reader's attention, and it cannot have been easy to write. The top third of each page is occupied by the essays that JC is writing for a German publisher.

The middle third of the page tells the story of JC's relationship with Anya, a Philippine-Australian beauty he meets in his building's basement laundry room. In the manner of old men who have loved women, he feels an immediate flash of desire, but, cagy and reasonable, he resists temptation. Instead of making a pass or venturing a proposition, he engages her to type the essays he dictates into a recording machine. Her secretarial skills aren't much, but she becomes his Segretaria, his Secret Aria, an echo of Humbert Humbert's string of endearing names for Lolita. When they discuss his work, she bosses him around, adding to his infatuation.

On the bottom third of each page appears a running commentary by Anya on JC and on her own live-in affair with Alan, and also Alan's comments to Anya on JC. Alan is an Australian yob who has worked his way to being a financial consultant; in his case that may mean he is a crook. He has planted spyware on the hard drive of JC's computer, which reports on everything JC confides to his computer, especially his finances. Alan's Thatcherite lucubrations are a counterpoint for JC's sometimes quirky and more often predictable worldview: JC distrusts democracy and deplores the decline of Australian political life, loathes George W. Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld, feels shame descending upon him when he thinks of Guantanamo and Americans' use of torture. Alan, we soon learn, has concocted a larcenous scheme designed to get his hands on JC's money. Anya's response is somber and unequivocal: She will stand by her JC. More than that, she will be there to hold his hand and give him a kiss when the end comes, "just to remind him of what he is leaving behind."

So it turns out in the end that Coetzee has written a sometimes sentimental love story that plays out nicely to the legato accompaniment of his pronouncements, political and cultural, some of which hit the bull's eye while some come to the verge of pomposity. I said "his pronouncements," but of course they are JC's essays, which is a reminder that not everything in Coetzee's novel is as it seems. Except this: Lovely Anya has her heart in the right place, and JC is lucky enough to understand that. Is the experimental form the story took a success? I was amused and at the same time hoped that the marvelously inventive Mr. Coetzee will move beyond it.

Copyright 2008, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 240 pages
• Publisher: Viking Adult (December 27, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0670018759
• ISBN-13: 978-0670018758
• Product Dimensions: 8.4 x 5.7 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.9 out of 5 stars See all reviews (21 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #41,469 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

45 of 58 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Novel and essays, October 30, 2007

By	Sirin (London, UK) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Diary of a Bad Year (Hardcover)

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.

5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars A stylist honed at his craft, January 8, 2008

By	Bookreporter.com (New York, New York) - See all my reviews

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

6 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Coetzee is smarter than that, February 8, 2008

By	mr waggish (new york) - See all my reviews

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.