J.M. Coetzee's "Dusklands" is actually two short novellas -- both fairly brutal portrayals of revenge. I struggled through the first, "The Vietnam Project" which was really dry and somewhat boring until the final act, while I found "The Narrative of Jacobus Coetzee" far more interesting.

This was Coetzee's debut novel -- I wouldn't say I particularly enjoyed these works, I can certainly see, if this is where he started, why he would go on to be awarded a Pulizter later on.

I've read this really isn't a great introduction to his works so I perhaps started reading him with the wrong book.

Oi. At least it was short. Not sure how this made it in to my list of to-reads.

With Coetzee you never know what you'll get, in its specifics. What you do know, though, is that you will be calmly taken for a walk into a physical or metaphorical space, on a journey into the unknown or the new-to-you, where you will see strange and perhaps exotic things, and then you will be punched in the face. But it's not really a sucker punch. It's not "haha, got you", just for the sake of it. It's more, "this is the world we all have created, why are you surprised by my punch?"

As always, the compact, tight prose packs quite the punch, and one could write pages upon pages unpacking said punch [1]. There's also a clever multi- and meta- narrative, just in case you needed to fill a few hundred other pages. So I will limit myself to one aspect of this book [2]: the way that we are the world we live in, we're not separate from it, and we're constantly (re-)creating it.

Perhaps I've been unduly influenced by reading this article [3], but to my mind the "coincidence" only reinforces the point. Just listen to these:

"How, then, asked the stone, can the hammer-wielder who seeks to penetrate the heart of the universe be sure that there exist any interiors? Are they not perhaps fictions...?" (78)

"I become a spherical reflecting eye moving through the wilderness and ingesting it. Destroyer of the wilderness, I move through the land cutting a devouring path from horizon to horizon. There is nothing from which my eye turns, I am all that I see." (79)

We are all that we experience.


[1] There's also an "essential-ness" to the prose. No superfluous sentences. If you were the kind of person who likes to underline important bits in a book, you'd be underlining almost every sentence.

[2] I'm cleverly avoiding the philosophy of history/narrative aspect of the book, because that would take a whole 'nother book-length post to get through.

[3] "There are any number of stories going on at once, worlds manifesting themselves through the proxy our bodies offer." - Riccardo Manzotti (http://www.nybooks.com/daily/2018/01/29/consciousness-and-the-world/)

“I become a spherical reflecting eye moving through the wilderness and ingesting it. Destroyer of the wilderness, i move through the land cutting a devouring path horizon to horizon. There is nothing from which my eye turns, I am all that I see. [...] I am a transparent sac with a black core full of images and a gun. [...] The gun stands for the hope, [...] the gun is our mediator with the world the therefore our savior.”

All of the themes I expect from Coetzee are here and gestating in embryonic overwrought prose with a postmodern bent that critiques written and oral South African history and contemporary (70s contemporary) imperialism as seen in America's involvement in the Vietnam War, but it's all so grating and slow and does not have the efficiency and confidence of his later novels. Cool beginning though. Deeply strange and with images that have left me a tad shaken, even if the stories have a tendency to bore.

Es increíble la contradicción entre ambos relatos, la dicotomía entre la víctima y el victimario, entre la guerra organizada y el conflicto local. Las letras de ambos son increíbles, así como el desenlace brutal, real y sin timos de los problemas individuales.