John Maxwell Coetzee:

Capturing the divine spark

Amalshan Gunerathne

Awards and achievements

* James Tait Black Memorial Prize
* Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize
* Sunday Express Book of the Year
* Jerusalem Prize
* The Irish times International Fiction Prize
* Commonwealth Writers Prize
* Nobel Prize in Literature

Coetzee’s novels

*Dusklands 1974
*In the Heart of the Country 1977
*Waiting for the Barbarians 1980
*Life & Times of Michael K 1983
*Foe 1980
*Age of Iron 1990
*The Master of Petersburg 1994
*The Lives of Animals 1999
*Disgrace 1999
*Elizabeth Costello 2003
*Slow Man 2005
*Diary of a Bad Year 2007

John Maxwell Coetzee, a South African born writer was the first author to win the ‘Booker Prize’ twice. He first won the award in 1983 for the novel, Life & Times of Michael K. Then in 1999; he won it again for the novel Disgrace. In 2003, he won the Nobel Prize for Literature.

He first took the limelight with the novel Waiting for the Barbarians in 1980. The novel gave him instant international acclaim as he won both ‘James Tait Black Memorial Prize’ and ‘Geofrrey Faber Memorial Prize’. The novel set in a nameless empire depicts the story of a town magistrate who falls in love with a barbarian girl. The girl was tortured by the minions of Colonel Joll, the leader of the empire’s forces, when the magistrate decides to help her.

His booker prize winning novel, Life & Times of Michael K, set in Cape Town South Africa during the time of 1970-1980 civil war, portrays the story of ‘Michael K’, an institutionalized simpleton who goes on a perilous voyage to take his ageing mother to her birthplace in Prince Albert. Soon after leaving setting off, his mother dies. Yet he does not give up on his quest and decides to take his mother’s ashes to her birthplace in ‘Prince Albert’.

His novel Disgrace is set in post apartheid period depicts the story of ‘David Lurie’, a South African English Professor who loses his reputation, dignity and self-esteem after he was accused of seducing one of his own students. The theme of “Life Times of Michael K and Disgrace are a bit similar. Both novels portray the way in which a man is force to accept the realities of life and death even after he is broken down almost to nothing.

Four years after the publication of ‘Disgrace’, he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2003. Commenting on his work, the press release of ‘The Nobel Prize in Literature for 2003’ read,

“Like the man in the famous Magritte painting who is studying his neck in a mirror, at the decisive moment Coetzee’s characters stand behind themselves, motionless, incapable of taking part in their own actions...It is in exploring weakness and defeat that Coetzee captures the divine spark in man.”