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A review by donato
Dusklands by J.M. Coetzee
5.0
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/)
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/)