Overview

J.M. Coetzee is one of the world's most intriguing authors. Compelling, razor-sharp, erudite: the adjectives pile up but the heart of the fiction remains elusive. Now, in J.M. Coetzee and the Life of Writing, David Attwell explores the extraordinary creative processes behind Coetzee's novels from Dusklands to The Childhood of Jesus. Using Coetzee's manuscripts, notebooks, and research papers--recently deposited at the Harry Ransom Center of the University of Texas at Austin--Attwell produces a fascinating story. He shows convincingly that Coetzee's work is strongly autobiographical, the memoirs being continuous with the fictions, and that his writing proceeds with never-ending self-reflection. Having worked closely with him on Doubling the Point: Essays and Interviews and given early access to Coetzee's archive, David Attwell is an engaging, authoritative source. J. M. Coetzee and the Life of Writing is a fresh, fascinating take on one of the most important and opaque literary figures of our time. This moving account will change the way Coetzee is read, by teachers, critics, and general readers.

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9780198746331

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a fascinating account... Attwell's writing is finely attuned to his subject matter, making for a careful consideration of the life and work of a careful novelist Sunday Times (South Africa)

A study of manuscripts and notebooks may sound like a dry exercise in scholarship, but David Attwell's book is nothing of the sort. It is a fascinating, highly readable, and tremendously insightful account of the processes through which some of the greatest novels of our time came into being, and in telling this story Attwell shows in illuminating detail the inseparability of Coetzee's creative activity from the significant events of his life. Derek Attridge, University of York With exemplary care, clarity, and sensitivity David Attwell shows just how illuminating a literary biography can be. Unfailingly interesting and insightful, this invaluable work is, above all, a pleasure to read. Zoe Wicomb David Attwell's J.M. Coetzee and the Life of Writing sheds startling new light on the relentless process of making and remaking that has produced the 2003 Nobel Prize-winner's oeuvre. In a series of readings outstanding for their meticulousness, care and sensitivity, Attwell gives us a study of J.M. Coetzee in time, yet also, ultimately, beyond time, confirmed in his position as one of the great writers of the late twentieth century. Charting Attwell's encounter with the remarkable Coetzee archive in Austin, Texas, the book is marked throughout by Attwell's palpable passion for Coetzee's writing, and evident love of the birth-land he shares with his subject. With this book our understanding of this writer's life's work, as well as of the work of a life, especially, but not only, that of Coetzee, is transformed. Elleke Boehmer, Professor of World Literature in English, University of Oxford

a fascinating account... Attwell's writing is finely attuned to his subject matter, making for a careful consideration of the life and work of a careful novelist Sunday times (South Africa)

Author Information

David Attwell is Professor of English at the University of York. He was educated at the University of Natal in Durban, the University of Cape Town, and the University of Texas at Austin. He has published widely in postcolonial studies, specialising in South African literature. With Derek Attridge he co-edited The Cambridge History of South African Literature (2012). His previous books include J.M. Coetzee: South Africa and the Politics of Writing (1993), J.M. Coetzee, Doubling the Point: Essays and Interviews (1992) of which he was editor and interviewer, and Rewriting Modernity: Studies in Black South African Literary History (2005 and 2006).

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