I tell my mother
I’ve won the Nobel Prize.
Again? she says. Which
discipline this time?
It’s a little game
we play: I pretend
I’m somebody, she
pretends she isn’t dead.
Andrea Cohen’s most recent books are Kentucky Derby and Long Division. She directs the Blacksmith House Poetry Series in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Reading the news about Patrick Modiano today, I was struck by the insipidness of the Nobel Foundation’s citation: “for the art of memory with which he has evoked the most ungraspable human destinies and uncovered the life-world of the occupation.” It bears all the hallmarks of an overblown blurb, one of those in which a bold, gimlet-eyed novelist is elucidating the now, or a limpid, singular poet is saying the unsayable. (Very few poets are saying the sayable these days, if our blurbs are to be believed.)
Although it announced a change in January, Washington has simply made the country economically more dependent. Cubans continue to survive amid blackouts and shortages, but a new private class is is taking on roles that used to belong to the state
The Mexican director releases ‘Digger,’ a tragicomedy that took a decade to complete, with the actor at the peak of his career: ‘He did a great job — very difficult but also very joyful’
Thirty years on, Baz Luhrmann’s film retains its status as a 1990s cult classic thanks to iconic costumes, an addictive aesthetic, and a singular cinematic language
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| JM Coetzee |
The Nobel laureate’s new collection of stories is concerned with death, desire and old age, glinting with flashes of humour and grand, existential strangeness
Eileen Chang made it to 74. Woolf, 59. Oodgeroo Noonuccal, 72. Wisława Szymborska, 88. Naguib Mahfouz managed 94 (a good innings). Baldwin, 68. Patrick White, 78. Soseki, 49. Cao Xueqin was about 40 or 50; the records vary. Beckett reached 83 – JM Coetzee’s current age. And Imre Kertész, brilliant, embattled – by Parkinson’s, by depression – lived to see 86.
BOOKS OF THE YEAR
Martin Amis once complained that JM Coetzee had “got no talent”, showing perhaps that obsessive ranking of talent (here used in a far more debased sense than TS Eliot’s) is a pastime favoured by those who are not, like Coetzee, writers of genius. Even more improbably, Amis claimed that Coetzee was not funny, which bespeaks a cloth ear for the more sophisticated kind of irony. It would certainly surprise readers of the hilarious Slow Man, or indeed the first two novels in this sequence, The Childhood of Jesus and The Schooldays of Jesus, in which a dreamlike mode of nowhere and no-when reminiscent of Kafka (and Coetzee’s own early Waiting for the Barbarians) is illuminated by sparks of sardonic humour or sheer childlike silliness. The final book of the trilogy, however, as one might with trepidation expect from its title, is a far darker affair.
The Death of Jesus
by J. M. Coetzee
(Viking, May 2020)
by Marc Farrant
During a 1992 interview with Nobel Prize-winning novelist J.M. Coetzee, critic Richard Begam surfaced the well-worn issue of the death of the novel, positing that literature had “fallen into a debilitating narcissism” which produces works “of interest only to the academic” before asking after Coetzee’s thoughts. Notoriously taciturn in public and thoughtful in interviews, Coetzee suggested that the tightening bond between writers and the academy has indeed led to more esoteric forms of the novel, and with regard to himself: “Yes, I may indeed be cutting myself off, at least from today’s readers; nevertheless, what I am engaged in doing is more important than maintaining that contact.” Since the 1990s, it is tempting to see a correlation between increased academic interest in Coetzee’s works and his decreasing engagement with, and from, the public. Coetzee’s Nobel Prize in 2003 largely recognized him as the preeminent writer of the South African experience, for example, as we see in the powerful apartheid allegory Waiting for the Barbarians (1980). Disgrace (1999) grappled with the country’s uneasy transition to a post-apartheid state by reflecting on the career and disgrace of a middle-aged academic. The truth, however, is that by 2003 South Africa had receded into the rearview mirror and Coetzee’s new work, Elizabeth Costello, was positioned firmly on academic soil. This philosophical novel, featuring an eponymous academic protagonist touring the world delivering lectures on topics such as animal rights and renaissance humanism, set the tone for Coetzee’s writings in the 2000s, including the Jesus trilogy and its culminating installment, The Death of Jesus.
Polly Mellen by Richard Avedon, 2002
In a career that spanned more than half a century, Polly Mellen , today 90 years old, helped create some of the most indelible imagery in the history of fashion. Her work as a stylist and editor, first under the legendary Diana Vreeland at Harper’s Bazaar, and later under both Vreeland and Grace Mirabella at Vogue, helped define a new, more modern ethos about clothes and how women wore them.
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| Gigi Hadid stars in CR Fashion Book #8 fashion feature |
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| Jaden Smith |
