Volume 6 Issue.1: 2019 Page No 10-24
https://doi.org/10.33329/ijelr.6119.1024
A REVIEW ON NOVELS OF J.M. COETZEE
POONAM1, R P SHARMA2, SRIKANT SHARMA3
1Research Scholar, Department of English, Shri Venketeshwar
University, Gajraula, UP.
2Associate Professor, Department of English, Shri Venketeshwar
University, Gajraula, UP.
3Dhanauri Degree College, Dhanauri, Roorkee
Abstract
J.M. Coetzee is one of the greatest
novelists of 21st century. He was born in Cape Town,
South Africa, on 9 February 1940, the elder of two children. J.M.
Coetzee is a South African novelist, essayist, linguist, translator
and recipient of the 2003 Nobel Prize in Literature. In 1963, he was
awarded a Master of Arts degree from UCT for a dissertation on the
novels of Ford Madox Ford. His experiences in English were later
recounted in Youth (2002), his second volume of fictionalized
memoirs. In his first novel Dusklands (1974), Coetzee focuses on two
setting: one, the US States Department during the Vietnam era and
the other, stories of exploration and conquest of Southern Africa in
the 1970's by a man named Jocabus Coetzee. These two vastly
different locations work together to bring out the alarm and
paranoia of aggressors no matter what the location and to show the
unthinkable ways in which dominant groups impose their ways upon
other culture.
His second novel, In the Heart of the
Country (1977), delves in the complex relationships that form
between the colonizer and the colonized. It takes place on a
desolate form in South Africa told through the perspective of an
intelligent yet meek European woman. She clashes with her father
when he takes an African mistress, causing a rift that leads towards
vengeance, violence and a muddling of her own relationship with the
Africans.
His third novel, Waiting for Barbarians he
tells a story of a Magistrate who lives peacefully in a garrison of
the Empire which is located in the frontier of a country which from
time to time has been attacked by barbarians. South Africa is never
mentioned in the novel though suggested. The arrival of a general
from the big city, however, it brings horror to the town dragging in
barbarians to be tortured. This reveals plots against the Empire.
Soon after, the Magistrate attracted to one of the barbarians women.
She has been left one- eyed and injured in one foot. The Magistrate
takes care of her and the gossip spreads among the settlers. The
Magistrate is punished by the Empire. He has exposed to public
shame, isolated, tortured. Then he made ‘attack plans' with
the barbarians and the women, and finally freed, but condemned to
live like a beggar. With the same electrical intensity of language
and insight that he brought to Waiting for the Barbarians and
The Master of Petersburg, J. M. Coetzee reinvents the story
of Robinson Crusoe and in so doing, directs our attention to the
seduction and tyranny of storytelling itself. His first novel to win
the Booker prize The Life and Times of Michael.
Keyword: J.M. Coetzee, Petersburg,
Barbarians, Magistrate
