Getting Past Coetzee

· Random House
4.8
4 reviews
eBook
15
Pages
Eligible
Ratings and reviews aren’t verified  Learn more

About this eBook

Ten years ago, I was commissioned by a famous poet-editor to write a profile of Coetzee for a London review. At the time, the offer was a big break, and could have led to great things. I was fresh out of university and the editor was high-up at Faber and Faber, a talent scout for The New Yorker. But it never got written.

Instead of providing a controlled and judicious survey of the oeuvre, I found myself obsessed by minor details on the outskirts of his work. The grim memoir Youth (2002) had just appeared and I wrote at length about the stockings full of clotting cheese that young “John” hangs up in his kitchen – proof of his extreme thriftiness, in life as in prose. The fish fingers that he fries in olive oil in a London garret, trying to emulate the Mediterranean diet of Ford Madox Ford: these finer points of domestic economy seemed laden with meaning. So this became my account of stalking the South African writer JM Coetzee on page and in the halls of academe.

Ratings and reviews

4.8
4 reviews
Thulebona Asimbonge
18 January 2023
good
Did you find this helpful?

About the author

Hedley Twidle, 32, was born in Johannesburg. He studied in KwaZulu-Natal, then at Oxford and York, and lived for several years in Edinburgh before taking up a post as lecturer in English at the University of Cape Town. Between 2007 and 2012, Twidle worked on the Cambridge History of South African Literature, published this year. At the moment he is teaching and thinking about life-writing, essays and literary non-fiction in Africa. More of his writing can be found at www.seapointcontact.wordpress.com.

Rate this eBook

Tell us what you think.

Reading information

Smartphones and tablets
Install the Google Play Books app for Android and iPad/iPhone. It syncs automatically with your account and allows you to read online or offline wherever you are.
Laptops and computers
You can listen to audiobooks purchased on Google Play using your computer's web browser.
eReaders and other devices
To read on e-ink devices like Kobo eReaders, you'll need to download a file and transfer it to your device. Follow the detailed Help Centre instructions to transfer the files to supported eReaders.