STRANGER SHORES

A striking collection of 26 literary essays, many taken from The New York Review of Books, that amply display Coetzee’s freethinking erudition and go-your-own-way intellectual honesty.

In prose that is smooth as milk over the bottle’s lip, Coetzee (Disgrace, 2000, etc.) unleashes his take on a battery of writers ranging from Samuel Richardson and Daniel Dafoe to William Gass and Daphne Rooke. He chides Salman Rushdie for not knowing what he’s talking about (“with all respect due to the author, one must demure”), even when what he’s talking about is The Moor’s Last Sigh. He covers Joseph Brodsky’s critical poetics in a voice that is as vibrant as the Russian’s own, and he wittily observes that A.S. Byatt’s characters “in times of crisis . . . do not go into therapy.” There are quick, lambent biographies of Breyten Breytenbach, Noel Mostert, Alan Paton, and Helen Suzman, as well as one of Thomas Pringle, father of English-language poetry in South Africa (whom Coetzee garrotes, labeling his work “indifferent”). He cuts Cees Nooteboom for his lack of anguish over the expulsion of heartfelt imagination from the world, but he applauds fellow Dutchman Harry Mulisch’s sure handling of the “terrible fissure in European history opened by the Holocaust.” He lauds Amos Oz for that same sure hand, accompanied by a light touch, in his politically-charged novels set in the fluid margins of Israel. Coetzee allows his emotional sentiments to percolate through these critiques and tries to measure the same in his subjects, as in an essay on Nadine Gordimer reconnoitering the realm of the artist’s special calling, that “art tells a truth transcending the truth of history,” wherein the goal of writing can strive for the transformation of society.

Deeply intelligent, provocative, and enjoyable literary investigations.