JM Coetzee’s Cold Realism

JM Coetzee has not always set his fiction in South Africa: The Master of St Petersburg (1994) took place in Dostoevsky’s Russia; Waiting for the Barbarians (1980) on the edges of a hellish nowhere known only as “The Empire”; his Jesus trilogy, too, was set in an unnamed, though more peaceful, land. But for better or worse, Coetzee will be seen as a product of his native country. His Booker Prize wins were for books set in South Africa: The Life and Times of Michael K (1983) and Disgrace (1999). Awarding him the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2003, the Swedish Academy told Coetzee: “You are a Truth and Reconciliation Commission on your own, starting with the basic words for our deepest concerns.”