JLF: The Old Woman and The Cats, read by JM Coetzee

“You have held an Indian audience silent for over forty five minutes…”

Of all the discussions, debates and readings at the festival, this was my favourite, because it was such a pure reading. Coetzee offered only a brief introduction, took no questions; this was not the usual ten-minute excerpt, either.
Only poets read a complete piece of work these days, and sometimes playwrights. The fiction author must read in excerpts, offering short takes that s/he hopes will be enough to draw you, the reader, into the rest of the work. To have a complete short story, read by an author like Coetzee, is a gift.

After he read, I was thinking about the unequal relationship between readers and auhors. Seated across the famously silent Coetzee at a dinner hosted by Random House the previous day, I had little to say to him: the author has no time for small talk, and doesn’t like discussing his books, which set certain limits on the conversation. We spoke in brief spurts about vegetarian Indian cuisines, about cats; Neel Mukherjee and he discussed the Naxal movement in India, and then we all returned to our shining thalis of gatte ki subzi and kair sangri.

Aside from my own social shyness, I seldom want to talk to the writers whose work has meant the most to me, because that conversation might be both too personal—the year Waiting For Barbarians changed my life, the year Disgrace changed my thinking—and superfluous, because their works gave me as a reader everything I needed. There are writers you read in one voracious gulp, discovering all their books, and obsessively reading everything, every last short story, every out-take and interview, over the course of two, three years—that was how I’d read Garcia Marquez and Tagore.
Coetzee was, for me, the other kind of writer: you discover their writing in your teens, and then you follow them as the books come out, each new book defining and changing a key part of your twenties and thirties. Coetzee had been my window into understanding violence and estrangement and the remoteness of the human heart, and then later, he became perhaps the only twentieth century writer to include animals into his view of the world—not as characters, but as the co-inhabitants of a world we think of as “peopled”, as silent and often helpless sharers in the actions of humankind.

Here is Coetzee, reading one of his Lessons. The writer Neel Mukherjee explained to me that Coetzee’s Lessons were not limited to Elizabeth Costello, but his preferred way of combining the essay with fiction. This lesson is about cats, and why they don’t have faces; about strays of all kinds, and children, and the relationship between parent and child, about estrangement and, perhaps, love. You must imagine him reading this on the vast, crowded lawns of the Diggi Palace in Jaipur, the afternoon sun bright on our faces, the humans silent and rapt, and only the green parrots punctuating Coetzee’s voice with their swift squawks.

Link: The Old Woman and The Cats, read by Coetzee.

Book review: Summertime by J M Coetzee

(Published in the Business Standard, October 2009)Summertime: Scenes From Provincial Life
J M Coetzee
Harvill/ Secker
Rs 799, 266 pages


That this is a book by J M Coetzee about a dead and not entirely successful writer called John Coetzee will surprise no one who knows the work of the real Coetzee. Perhaps the only defence left to a writer as highly regarded and relentlessly pursued as the (real, not fictional) J M Coetzee, and as insistently reticent, is to offer himself up in sacrificial fiction.

The work for which J M Coetzee is best known comes from his early and middle period: The Life and Times of Michael K, Waiting for the Barbarians, Disgrace. In these and other works, Coetzee revealed himself as a chronicler of history—including but not limited to the history of South Africa—who was willing to deal in history’s ambiguities as well as its certainties. Each of these novels was an exploration of the human history of pain, broken by moments of compassion but rarely optimistic of redemption.

Some years ago, Coetzee, pursued by fame, began to create a different kind of fiction. His Nobel speech, built around the character and voice of a modern-day Crusoe, remains one of the strangest acceptance speeches ever in the history of the prize, written in the dispassionate third-person. He turned a fictionalized lecture on 'The Lives of the Animals' into a book about a fictional writer called Elizabeth Costello, and wrote two fictionalized memoirs: Boyhood and Youth.

Summertime is a companion volume to these two, the last in a trilogy of strange and unsettling works, where the novelist becomes his own subject. There is a biographer of John Coetzee, unnamed and largely unidentified except through the medium of his questions, and his silences. He seeks to understand the life of the fictional Coetzee through the writer’s encounters with women, and what we are offered is a series of interviews and reflections on relationships that run the gamut from affair to misunderstood encounter to close friendship.

“He was not what most people would call attractive. He was scrawny, he had a beard, he wore horn-rimmed glasses and sandals. He looked out of place, like a bird, one of those flightless birds; or like an abstracted scientist who had wandered by mistake out of his laboratory.”

This is the voice of the married woman who has an affair, ambiguous and not entirely satisfactory, with John Coetzee; she sees him as a loner living with his father, both stumbling with ineptitude around the empty spaces of their lives. She is startled to hear that Coetzee has written a book; it is not a usual accomplishment in her circles. Her marriage breaks up, and to her, it’s the story of her life, her independence, that is central, with the writer an appendix, not the main chapters.

The women offer different perspectives, all remarking on the writer Coetzee’s essential strangeness, his talent and need for distance. A cousin, Margot, remembers his brilliance but also his remoteness from family: “John sitting on the stoep of that dreary little house making up poems!” A Brazilian woman who meets him as a teacher is unimpressed, by his teaching and by his letters to her: “That is what I ask: how can you be a great writer if you are just an ordinary little man?”

It would be a mistake to read too much into Summertime’s presentation of John Coetzee, poet, writer, possibly a failed man and perhaps even a mediocre practitioner of his work. But in these critiques—and the women in John Coetzee’s life are his reviewers, more than his biographers—the writer emerges as dry, reserved. The central question, as one woman asks, is whether a writer who cannot connect as a human being can truly write something that demands intimacy—the novel being perhaps the most intimate of all ways to examine the human life.

Summertime is an uneasy read, intensely rewarding but also deeply disturbing. Coetzee offers, through the fictional Coetzee, a more intimate look at his own life and passage through the world than a standard biography might reveal. But this intimacy is fictional, about an alter ego to whom intimacy is alien and uncomfortable, and it is hard to draw a line between Coetzee the writer, and his creation, Coetzee the writer.

It’s when he appears to be most open, in his fictionalized biographies, that Coetzee is also trying to tell us to trust nothing. Memoirs and biographies are compelling, but the truth of a life is elusive; and by opening up his own life in fictional form, he keeps it firmly hidden from any would-be seeker after that truth.

The BS column: How not to write about evil

(Published in the Business Standard, May 5, 2009)

Over half a century of Indian writing in English has produced several contenders for the title of the defintive Partition novel; but other conflicts have been more elusive. Partition has been recorded in many Indian languages—from Manto’s classic, brutal short stories to Khushwant Singh’s Train to Pakistan to Chaman Nahal’s Azaadi, literature has kept pace with history.



Every few years, someone attempts to write the great Kashmiri novel, but even Salman Rushdie (with Shalimar the Clown) missed the mark. The intensity and tragedy of Kashmir has been served better by non-fiction writers than by fiction writers. A handful of novelists have tried to make sense of the Bhopal gas tragedy, of 1984 and of the Gujarat riots, but I would argue that Indra Sinha (Animal’s People), Shonali Bose (Amu) and Raj Kamal Jha (Fireproof) have been adequate witnesses, but fall short in literary terms.



In their defence, it has never been easy to write about tragedy—or to write about evil, as two recently published works demonstrate. The first, Jonathan Littell’s The Kindly Ones, is a 900-plus page brick of a novel that was highly acclaimed in France before becoming a worldwide bestseller. It is also one of the most repellent books I have read in recent years—not because of its subject, but because of Littell’s perspective.



The protagonist of The Kindly Ones is Maximilien Aue, a former SS officer in the Second World War, complicit in a number of crimes, now living in retirement and working in a lace-making factory. Littell takes his title from the euphemism for the Furies, forces of merciless but exact vengeance in Roman mythology, and he takes his inspiration for Maximilien Aue’s life history from the troubled, bloody history of the legendary House of Atreus. Novelist and reviewer Laila Lalami called The Kindly Ones “a pornographic catalogue of horrors”, and most reviewers have been left disturbed, if not repulsed, by Littell’s mindlessly graphic musings.

(Speaking personally, I can't remember ever being so repelled by a novel. Not shocked; most of Littell's catalogue of horrors is familiar to any reader of Roman mythology or pulp horror fiction. But to read this book was to swing between boredom and deep, almost physical, distaste.)

Relentlessly repetitious, the novel presents Aue’s lust for his sister in terms that do violence to the memory of the Holocaust; he has sexual fantasises that cast her in the role of a prisoner in the camps, for instance. In her review for The New Republic, Ruth Franklin caught it best when she commented: “But The Kindly Ones is not an important novel, because it fails absolutely to add anything of significance to our understanding of its subject, which is nothing less than the most perplexing question of modernity. How could human beings undertake….an unprecedented systematic program of mass extermination against other human beings? “ It is, however, one of the most widely discussed novels of this year, chiefly for its more sensational aspects and because of the huge advance the author received.


J M Coetzee has, far more elegantly and incisively than Littell, examined the question of how one writes about evil in several of his books. In Elizabeth Costello, the title character comes to the conclusion that you can’t write about evil, or bear witness beyond a certain point, without inflicting damage on yourself as a human being. And besides, she asks, how reliable is memory anyway? She writes: “"Could there really have been witnesses who went home that night and, before they forgot, before memory, to save itself, went blank, wrote down, in words that must have scorched the page, an account of what they had seen, down to the words the hangman spoke to the souls consigned to his hands, fumbling old men for the most part, …. exhausted, shivering, hands in their pockets to hold up their pants, whimpering with fear….?"

A much shorter, much drier document manages to bear witness in its own way. In its scant 43 pages, and in the detached language of the objective witness, the Red Cross Report on Torture effectively presents evidence that indicts the US government for its treatment of suspects and prisoners at Guantanamo. From political websites to the venerable New York Review of Books, the Red Cross Report has opened up a debate on the nature of bureaucratic evil and legalised crime.


Littell offers one way to examine violence that is perhaps valid, but that is deeply repugnant: approach it through the lens of voyeurism, exaggerate the nature of evil to the point where it becomes ridiculous in its offensiveness. The Red Cross report offers a more traditional way: be a witness, write perhaps without the scorching words Coetzee (and Costello) demand, but with absolute honesty. The novelist who seeks to capture the nature of an undertaking such as a holocaust, a riot or a pogrom, must find a way between these two paths. Several Indian film-makers and photographers have found a way of telling their truth, but for the Indian writer, capturing the nature of the beast remains elusive.