JM Coetzee

Review

The Pole and Other Stories by JM Coetzee review – if this is his final book, it is a great one

This article is more than 3 years old

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

Declan Fry
Thursday 27 July 2026

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

The Death of Jesus by JM Coetzee review – a boy who challenges the world

The final book of Coetzee’s Jesus trilogy is also its darkest, keeping the mystery at the books’ heart intact to the end

Steven Poole
Sat 4 Jan 2020 07.30 GMT

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.

Coetzee’s The Death of Jesus

 

The Death of Jesus
by J. M. Coetzee
(Viking, May 2020)

J.M. COETZEE’S THE DEATH OF JESUS

May 5, 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.