If readers share any interest in literary criticism, I’m really enjoying this new Coetzee book: Inner Workings: Literary Essays 2000-2005.
Coetzee is a South African author who won the 2003 Nobel Prize in Literature – from what I’ve read (Disgrace) he has a satisfying, terse writing style. It reminds me of Kafka and Kundera. He has an interesting pedigree: bachelors in English and Math from Cape Town, worked in London as a computer programmer for IBM, and then a PhD in Linguistics from Austin.
These essays are each short (~20 pages) and focused on a facet of the life and works of an author: Italo Svevo, Robert Musil, Robert Walzer, Bruno Schulz, Joseph Roth, Sándor Márai, Günter Grass, Graham Greene, Saul Bellow, Philip Roth, Nadine Gordimer, Gabriel García Márquez, V.S. Naipaul, Walt Whitman, Paul Celan, Samuel Beckett.
