Inner Workings: essays 2000-2005
J M Coetzee Harvill Secker, 304pp, £17.99
ISBN 1846550459
Most readers of J M Coetzee’s third collection of essays will pick up the book because of its author’s distinguished reputation as a novelist. They won’t be disappointed: fans of his pared-down prose fiction will relish his precise, restrained style of literary criticism, which he trains on authors from Walter Benjamin to V S Naipaul.
But Coetzee is also a translator
of Dutch and Afrikaans and a former professor of English literature. He has strong views about translation, praising coinages that pay homage to an author’s original language (such as “embutterflied” for Robert Walser’s umschmetterlingelt) and arguing the case for translations that are “linguistically neutral” rather than dialect-specific. These essays also display his academic pedigree, offering insightful scholarly knowledge of his subjects’ background, although his tendency to illustrate points by divulging the endings of books can be frustrating.
At times he treats biographical information with a novelist’s sense of storytelling, including facts that are not really part of his textual criticism. But they only serve to enhance these wide-ranging essays, communicating Coetzee’s passion for literature.
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