โ Scribed by J. M. Coetzee
No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
Nobel Laureate and two-time Booker prize-winning author of Disgrace and The
Life and Times of Michael K , J. M. Coetzee tells the remarkable story of a
nation gripped in brutal apartheid in his Sunday Express Book of the Year
award-winner Age of Iron.
In Cape Town, South Africa, an elderly classics professor writes a letter to
her distant daughter, recounting the strange and disturbing events of her
dying days. She has been opposed to the lies and the brutality of apartheid
all her life, but now she finds herself coming face to face with its true
horrors: the hounding by the police of her servant's son, the burning of a
nearby black township, the murder by security forces of a teenage activist who
seeks refuge in her house. Through it all, her only companion, the only person
to whom she can confess her mounting anger and despair, is a homeless man who
one day appears on her doorstep.
In Age of Iron , J. M. Coetzee brings his searing insight and masterful
control of language to bear on one of the darkest episodes of our times.
'Quite simply a magnificent and unforgettable work' Daily Telegraph
'A superbly realized novel whose truth cuts to the bone' The New York Times
'A remarkable work by a brilliant writer' Wall Street Journal
South African author J. M. Coetzee was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature
in 2003 and was the first author to win the Booker Prize twice for his novels
Disgrace and The Life and Times of Michael K. His novel, Foe , an
exquisite reinvention of the story of Robinson Crusoe is also available in
Penguin paperback.
__
A retired South African professor's letters to her daughter in America,
telling both of her terminal cancer and of her country's afflictions,
constitute a novel that moves with the implacability of a nightmare.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.
This is the South African novelist's most direct indictment of apartheid yet.
It takes the form of a letter-diary from Mrs. Curren, a former classics
professor dying of cancer, to her daughter in America. She details a series of
strange events that turn her protected middle-class life upside down. A
homeless alcoholic appears at her door, eventually becoming her companion and
confessor. Her liberal sentiments and her very humanity are tested as she
experiences directly the horrors of apartheid. She comes to recognize South
Africa as a country in which the rigidity of both sides has led to barbarism
and to acknowledge her complicity in upholding the system. Less allegorical
than Coetzee's previous novels, this is still richly metaphoric. A brilliant,
chilling look at the spiritual costs of apartheid. Recom mended.
- Lawrence Rungren, Bedford Free P.L., Mass.
Copyright 1990 Reed Business Information, Inc.
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