John Maxwell Coetzee /kuˈtsiə/ (Ciudad del Cabo [Provincia del Cabo Occidental, Sudáfrica], 9 de febrero de 1940) es un escritor nacido en Sudáfrica de expresión inglesa y nacionalizado australiano, país donde reside actualmente. El 10 de diciembre de 2003 fue galardonado con el Premio Nobel de Literatura, convirtiéndose así en el cuarto africano que lo recibe.
Pasó su infancia y su primera etapa formativa entre Ciudad del Cabo y Worcester, además de en la provincia de El Cabo. Se licenció en matemáticas e inglés en la Universidad de Ciudad de El Cabo. A comienzos de los años 60 se desplazó a Londres (Inglaterra), donde trabajó durante algún tiempo como programador informático. Dejó constancia de esta etapa de su vida en su novela Juventud (2002). En 1969 se doctoró en lingüística computacional en la Universidad de Texas en Austin (EE. UU.). La tesis consistió en un análisis computarizado de la obra de Samuel Beckett.1 Después dio clases de Lengua y Literatura Inglesas en la Universidad Estatal de Nueva York en Búfalo (EE. UU.) hasta 1983. En 1984 volvió a Sudáfrica a ocupar una cátedra en Letras Inglesas en la Universidad de Ciudad de El Cabo, donde ejerció la docencia hasta su retiro en el año 2002. Durante 1989 estuvo en Estados Unidos como profesor visitante de la Universidad Johns Hopkins. En la actualidad desempeña funciones como investigador en el Departamento de Inglés de la Universidad de Adelaida (Australia). Coincidiendo con la Semana Literaria de Adelaida en marzo de 2006, Coetzee recibió la nacionalidad australiana, sin que ello, según él, lo aleje de Sudáfrica, su lugar de nacimiento y donde transcurre gran parte de su obra.
Sus obras, marcadas por un estilo simbólico y metafórico, cuestionan el régimen del apartheid y cualquier tipo de racismo, y exploran sus negativas consecuencias en el hombre y en la sociedad. Además de novelas, también ha publicado numerosas críticas literarias y diversas traducciones.
John Maxwell Coetzee /kuˈtsiə/(クッツェー、後半のツェーにアクセントがあります)は1940年の今日､2月９日に南アフリカのケープタウンでアフリカーナーの家系に生まれました。少年時代をケープタウンと内陸の町ヴスターで、その後の学生時代をケープタウンで過ごし──回想記風の作品 Boyhood: Scenes from Provincial Life（1997年）や Youth (2002年）を参照あれ──1960年に英文学の学位を、1961年に数学の学位を取得してケープタウン大学を卒業しました。
1961年に英国に渡り、コンピュータープログラマーとして働きながら、フォード・マドックス・フォードについて修士論文を書きました。その後、1965年に渡米してテキサス大学オースティン校で学び、サミュエル・ベケットの初期作品の言語学的研究で博士号を取得、バッファローのニューヨーク州立大学で教壇に立ちながら作品を書き始めました。
米国永住を希望していましたが、べトナム反戦の学内集会に出ていたとき参加者全員が逮捕されたことが原因でVISA取得がかなわず、1971年に南アフリカに帰国して、1972年からケープタウン大学で教職に就きました。以後ここで2001年まで英文学、言語学、文学、クリエイティヴライティングなどを教えました。2002年、オーストラリアのアデレードに移住し、アデレード大学の英文学部名誉研究員となり、2006年3月にはオーストラリアの市民権を取得しています。2003年までの6年間、シカゴ大学社会思想委員会にも所属しておりました。
1983年の Life and Times of Michael K で、さらに1999年の Disgrace でブッカー賞を受賞しました。これは同賞始まって以来の初の2回受賞でした（授賞式はいずれも欠席しています）。重層的な連想を引き起こしながら、無駄を削ぎ落とした硬質な文体で、人間存在の奥深くを描き出す作風は、実験的、寓意的、ポストモダンとさまざまに論評されてきましたが、そのたぐいいまれな倫理性とともに、同時代を生きるもっとも偉大な世界文学の作家の一人と見做されています。
ノーベル賞授賞時にスウェーデン・アカデミーがあげた理由は、「数々の装いを凝らし、アウトサイダーが巻き込まれていくところを意表を突くかたちで描いた。その小説は、緻密な構成と含みのある対話、すばらしい分析を特徴としている。しかし同時に、周到な懐疑心をもって、西欧文明のもつ残酷な合理性と見せかけの道徳性を容赦なく批判した」というものでした。アフリカ出身の受賞者としては、ナイジェリアのウォーレ・ショインカ、エジプトのナギーブ・マフフーズ、南アフリカのナディン・ゴーディマーについで4人目です。マスコミ嫌いで知られるJ. M. Coetzee は、2003年12月10日にストックホルムで行われた授賞式には出席しましたが、記者会見はしませんでした。
2006年9月末、国際サミュエル・ベケット・シンポジウムに特別ゲストとして招かれて初来日しました。さらに2007年12月に国際交流基金の招きで再来日をしています。2週間にわたって日本各地を旅行し、17日には東京で開かれた自作朗読会では、9月に出版された作品 Diary of a Bad Year をアレンジして朗読しました。
2009年8月、Boyhood: Scenes from Provincial、Youth と続いた三部から構成される自伝的小説の最終巻Summertime: Scenes from Provincial Life を発表。三度目のブッカー賞を受賞するかと話題になりましたが実現には至りませんでした。この自伝的三部作は2011年に Scenes from Provincial Life として一巻にまとめられています。
Ernesto Mr. T が最も評価しているのは Disgrace です。『恥辱』という和訳も出版されています。
以下、粗筋・世評等です。
David Lurie is a South African professor of English who loses everything: his reputation, his job, his peace of mind, his good looks, his dreams of artistic success, and finally even his ability to protect his own daughter. He is twice-divorced and dissatisfied with his job as a 'communications' lecturer, teaching one class in romantic literature at a technical university in Cape Town in post-apartheid South Africa. His "disgrace" comes when he almost forcibly seduces one of his more vulnerable students which is thereafter revealed to the school and a committee is convened to pass judgement on his actions. David refuses to apologize in any sincere form and so is forced to resign from his post. Lurie is working on a play concerning Lord Byron's final phase of life in Italy which mirrors his own life in that Byron is living a life of hedonism and excess and is having an affair with a married women, and "the irony is that he comes to grief from an escapade that Byron would have thought distinctly timid."
He is dismissed from his teaching position, after which he takes refuge on his daughter's farm in the Eastern Cape. For a time, his daughter's influence and natural rhythms of the farm promise to harmonise his discordant life. But the balance of power in the country is shifting. Shortly after becoming comfortable with rural life, he is forced to come to terms with the aftermath of an attack on the farm in which his daughter is raped and impregnated and he is violently assaulted. The novel also concerns David's interaction with a few other characters- Bev, an animal welfare and healer of sorts, and Lucy's former farmhand, the self-described "dog-man" who lives on the neighbouring property, who took care of his daughters dogs. David remains on the farm far past his welcome in order to try to keep his daughter safe, but instead finds himself apathetic and demoralized yet on a journey towards redemption.
Reception and interpretation
According to The Guardian, "any novel set in post-apartheid South Africa is fated to be read as a political portrait, but the fascination of Disgrace is the way it both encourages and contests such a reading by holding extreme alternatives in tension, salvation, ruin." In the new South Africa, violence is unleashed in new ways, and Lurie and his daughter become victims, yet the main character is no hero, on the contrary he commits violence in his own way too. This characterization of violence by both the 'white' and the 'black' man parallels feelings in post-apartheid South Africa where evil does not belong to the 'other' alone. By resisting the relegation of each group into positive and negative poles Coetzee portrays the whole range of human capabilities and emotions. The novel takes its inspiration from South Africa's contemporary social and political conflict, and offers a bleak look at a country in transition. This theme of transition is represented in various forms throughout the novel, in David's loss of authority, loss of sexuality, in the change in power dynamics of groups that were once solely dominate or subordinate, in the shift in material wealth etc. This state of transition means that Coetzee cannot make concrete classifications for each character, again emphasizing that no one is wholly good or evil, but both.
As in all of his mature novels, Coetzee here deals with the theme of exploitation. His favorite approach has been to explore the innocuous-seeming use of another person to fill one's gentler emotional needs. This is a story of both regional and universal significance. The central character is a confusing person, at once an intellectual snob who is contemptuous of others and also a person who commits outrageous mistakes. His story is also local; he is a white South African male in a world where such men no longer hold the power they once did. He is forced to rethink his entire world at an age when he believes he is too old to change and, in fact, should have a right not to. This theme, about the challenges of aging both on an individual and societal level, leads to a line, "No country, this, for old men," an ironic reference to the opening line of the W. B. Yeats poem, "Sailing to Byzantium". Furthermore, Lurie calls his preference for younger women a "right of desire", a quote taken up by South African writer André Brink for his novel "The Rights of Desire".
This is Coetzee's second book (after Life and Times of Michael K) where man is broken down almost to nothing before he finds some tiny measure of redemption in his forced acceptance of the realities of life and death. Coetzee has always situated his characters in extreme situations that compel them to explore what it means to be human. Though the novel is sparse in style, it covers a number of topics: personal shame, the subjugation of women, a changing country, animal rights, and romantic poetry and its symbolism.
Another important theme in the novel is the difficulty or impossibility of communication and the limits of language. Although Lurie teaches communications at Cape Town Technical University and is a scholar of poetry, language often fails him. Coetzee writes:
Although he devotes hours of each day to his new discipline, he finds its first premise, as enunciated in the Communications 101 handbook, preposterous: 'Human society has created language in order that we may communicate our thoughts, feelings, and intentions to each other.' His own opinion, which he does not air, is that the origins of speech lie in song, and the origins of song in the need to fill out with sound the overlarge and rather empty human soul.
The novel explores the difficulty of communication between men and women, between parents and children, and between humans and animals. David Lurie cannot speak about the attack with his daughter, Lucy, because she says that he will never understand what happened to her. He turns to other forms of communication: first, he tries to find a way to commune with animals, who can sense subtle, non-verbal emotions; at the same time, he attempts to write an opera about the poet Lord Byron, told from the perspective of Byron's mistress Teresa.
A 2006 poll of "literary luminaries" by The Observer newspaper named the work as the "greatest novel of the last 25 years" of British, Irish or Commonwealth origin in years between 1980 and 2005.
A film adaptation of Disgrace starring John Malkovich had its world premiere at the Toronto Film Festival in 2008, where it won the International Critics' Award.
Disgrace は人生観を根本から揺さぶる作品です。Ernesto Mr. T は この本を読んでから数日間眠れませんでした。
ご意見、ご質問等ございましたら、<ernestotaju@yahoo.co.jp> へ。
P. D. 奇しくも今日 拙ブログに南アフリカからの 初 visita がありました。
![【送料無料】J.M. Coetzee's Disgrace [ Andrew Van Der Vlies ]](https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/blogger_img_proxy/AEn0k_tjPvZHV3C4wnEPYyejdfOrPFyrjWNS7E3Ncwlz7xXlnKIllwe1DWoZFpxRuF-NHLonKvBHX72XW_a1tuqT6jcorCg_AOtLutzBKCNgbgTlN9T-DvbrBs74iTwOf1wNlwuz66oGtQU7ahbYrhU6YHiAbhqsKsGASqy9RuLaDqF7TdmO0HuisC00ACvEBds0Uj2JWiO-BboKeuACvxsupNzM1AlqG7F7nP4RWiq_3H_AZopLiiC60DYNPj2fT75on1q4rtKZ6iJoPqA162OtE1ooBNixbE5otjBLqUXhZVb3H0mynIRJwFWBJS6-8CxE2aZu0daqaavX03dq8LZ9VLNu7d_xukrY=s0-d)
