The scope of this new collection is wide, encompassing familiar and less familiar writers. It includes four essays on Australian writers, including Patrick White (two essays), Les Murray, and Gerald Murnane; and a couple on writers whose literary influence is clear in Coetzee’s own novels (Daniel Defoe, Heinrich von Kleist). Coetzee revisits the work of two writers he studied academically (Samuel Beckett and Ford Madox Ford, on whom he wrote his PhD and MA theses respectively) and shows the transnational reach of his reading by including essays on German, Spanish, French, Argentinian, and Russian writers (in translation). Most of the essays focus on particular works, some lesser known, including Argentinian writer Antonio Di Benedetto’s Zama (1956) and those of the fairly recently ‘discovered’ Russian Jewish writer Irène Némirovsky, who wrote in French. There is an affecting short reflection on Juan Ramón Jiménez’s book Platero and I (1917) that reads it, not primarily as a children’s story about a donkey, but as showing the ‘mutual bond between man and beast’ including the potential for ‘the moment so urgently longed for in the fantasy lives of children when the great divide between species crumbles away’, touching on Coetzee’s interest in the lives of animals.

Some essays cast new light on familiar works, such as the suggestion that Madame Bovary shows Flaubert’s ability to ‘formulate larger issues ... as problems of composition’; a masterly discussion of the ‘mobile meaning’ of the allegory in Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter (including the wonderful phrase, ‘Roger Chillingworth, who chills whatever he touches’); and scholarly analysis of the complex connotations of ‘nemesis’ in the piece on Philip Roth’s novel of that name. Some include echoes from Coetzee’s own fiction: Beckett’s Molloy, who needs ‘to ride a bicycle with only one good leg’ is a reminder of Paul Rayment in Slow Man (2005); the description of the dance in White’s The Solid Mandala – where ‘the mysteries can more easily be explored through the physical, intuitive, non-rational medium of dance than through the rational medium of language’ – suggests The Schooldays of Jesus (2016). The final essay in the collection takes a slightly different direction, providing a more historical than literary perspective on the life of Hendrik Witbooi, a Nama captain who fought the Germans in what was then South-West Africa (Namibia), through his letters and diary.

So why read essays written by an author whose own works have been the subject of so much literary criticism but who has consistently refused to comment on them himself? As Derek Attridge suggests in his Introduction to Inner Workings, the two obvious reasons for reading Coetzee’s critical prose include the hope that these essays will ‘throw light on the often oblique novels’ and the belief that a writer of such note will have ‘much to offer’ on the work of other writers: an inside view, as it were. Additionally, whereas each essay, review, or lecture was previously available to be read only in isolation, the collection of such essays in one volume affords the reader more concentrated exposure to Coetzee’s literary judgements, encourages one to read them in relation to one another, and enables comparisons across time periods.

One may pose the question, for example: have Coetzee’s opinions changed between the early and the ‘late’ essays? Here, the reader may compare the four ‘late essays’ on Beckett in this volume (published between 2009 and 2015) with the three ‘early essays’ in Doubling the Point (dated from 1970 to 1973). One clear difference is the more experimental style of the ‘late essay’ entitled ‘Eight Ways of Looking at Samuel Beckett’, which is part-parody, part-homage, and is written in an impressionistic way that is quite different from the other essays and reviews, incorporating echoes of Beckett’s work and including a somewhat startling comparison with Moby-Dick. It includes the intriguing thought experiment in which Coetzee ruminates on how history may have been changed if Beckett had been appointed to a lectureship in Italian at the University of Cape Town in 1937 (which he apparently applied for and was not offered), the very university at which Coetzee himself was a student and at which he was first appointed as a lecturer in English thirty-five years later. The thought that a Professor Samuel Beckett may have encountered a young John Coetzee as a student is a tantalising one (as suggested by Chris Ackerley who imagines this scenario in more detail in his chapter 'Style: Coetzee and Beckett' in A Companion to the Works of J.M. Coetzee [2011] edited by Tim Mehigan).

J.M. Coetzee (Flickr)

The other essays follow a fairly similar pattern: an outline of the writer’s life and biographical details (often including the personal circumstances surrounding the writing of a particular work), the historical and literary contexts, deft summary of the plot, and investigation of the text’s narrative and linguistic strategies. They are carefully researched and are always alert to the cracks, ironies, and discontinuities in the texts. His interest is in delving into the writer’s mind, the circumstances surrounding the work and the thinking processes that led to writerly choices in terms of form, style, and themes. While – as a critic and reviewer – he comments on the ‘success’ and ‘failure’ of the works he writes about (for example, he prefers Les Murray’s earlier poems to the later ‘lesser’ works and advises him to ‘let go of old grudges’ against ‘official’ Australian culture), Coetzee sometimes writes in the role of the reader, using the pronouns ‘we’ and ‘us’ to intimate a community of readers reading alongside him.

His concern as a critic/reviewer is always with the language of literature, as may be expected from one who studied linguistics. His insights are those of a fellow writer who faces similar issues in tackling problems of narration, but one who has, in addition, the sensibility of a literary scholar and teacher. Above all, he brings the perspective of one who has much to teach us about slow reading.