JM Coetzee

J.M. Coetzee is a writer who is strongly influenced by his own personal background of being born and growing up in South Africa. Although a white writer living in South Africa during apartheid, Coetzee grew to believe in and write with strong anti-imperialist feelings. His international writings tended to set him apart from fellow authors in South Africa and his writing was said to be mostly influenced by the postmodernist writers of Europe and America. These writers also contained many anti-imperialist sentiments as a reaction to the Vietnam war. Many of Coetzee's personal experiences and beliefs can be seen in his books. Coetzee describes his sense of alienation from fellow Afrikaners in his biography, Boyhood: Scenes from Provincial Life. Coetzee also writes in his biography and his novels about the laws that divided himself and others into racial categories that served to further alienate him.

This is evidenced in his first novel Dusklands. In this book Coetzee focuses on two settings: one, the US State Department during the Vietnam era and two, stories of the exploration and conquest of Southern Africa in the 1760’s by a man named Jacobus Coetzee. These two vastly different locations work together to bring out the alarm and paranoia of aggressors no matter what the location and to show the unthinkable ways in which dominant groups impose their ways upon other cultures.

His first novel to win the Booker Prize, The Life and Times of Michael K, is set in Cape Town, a city on the verge of racials wars, and centers around a gardener who attempts to transport his dying mother to the farm of her youth. Although she dies during the journey, Michael K continues on to her farm with her ashes. He lives quite happily in solitude on her old farm until he is captured and accused of aiding guerillas. The great weight of the novel relies on the fact that it does not focus in on racial separations but is more concerned with saving humanity as a whole.

In his latest novel and the one responsible for garnering him a second Booker prize, Disgrace, Coetzee deals with a South African professor name David who goes out to visit his daughter, Lucy's, farm. While he is there a gang of two men and one boy rapes his daughter. When he later sees the boy at a party thrown by Lucy's neighbor, Petrus, he demands justice. Petrus refuses, and promises protection from further attacks to Lucy only if she marries him. The issues in this novel deal with many of the current plights of South Africa. Land, crime, rape, lack of police protection and racial divides are all themes of the novel and problems in modern day South Africa.

All of Coetzee's writings are similar in that they often center on a solitary character. No direct moral is ever given, but rather situations are set up for the reader to think about. Coetzee’s aim is not to provide solutions, but to highlight problems and have the reader form their own conclusions.