Cossee, the publishers that have released many a Dutch translation of JM Coetzee’s work, will this year publish David Attwell’s English book on Coetzee’s creative process and the development of his novels.
Face to Face with Time is based on Attwell’s research of Coetzee’s manuscripts and documents made available to scholars since the opening of the Coetzee Archive at the University of Texas’ Harry Ransom Center last year. In his book, Attwell traces the genesis of such works as Disgrace, Waiting for the Barbarians and Life & Times of Michael K by comparing manuscripts in various stages of writing.
Providing a peek at this research, Attwell recently revealed his discovery that Waiting for the Barbarians had originally been set in Cape Town. Also divulged in Face to Face with Time is the fact Coetzee wrote a novel called The Burning of the Books on the dilemma of censorship, which was never published.
About the book
JM Coetzee is one of the most revered but elusive of authors in world literature. In Face to Face with Time, David Attwell gets closer to the genesis of Coetzee’s authorship than any other study to date. Using the author’s papers housed at the Ransom Centre of the University of Texas at Austin, Attwell describes Coetzee’s often-surprising beginnings and follows the fiction’s development through its idiosyncrasies and triumphs. This is an unusual critical biography, which tells a moving story about one of the most fascinating authorships of our time.
Face to Face with Time gives us a behind-the-scenes view of such literary masterpieces as Disgrace, Waiting for the Barbarians and Life & Times of Michael K. By comparing JM Coetzee’s manuscripts in several stages of writing, we discover some of the magic of one of the world’s most important contemporary writers. Face to Face with Time is an essential study for all who have read and loved Coetzee’s novels and fascinating insight in the mind of the Nobel Prize winner of 2003.
Whereas JC Kannemeyer’s biography (JM Coetzee: A Life in Writing, 2011) concentrates on Coetzee’s life, David Attwell focuses on the relationship between the work and the author, as this emerges from the manuscripts and the published novels. Attwell discovers that Coetzee is a meticulous writer, rewriting almost every sentence, who is not afraid to drastically alter storylines, settings and perspectives while writing his novels. And although the finished novels are distant from the author, Attwell finds that the start of every book is very personal.
We learn that Waiting for the Barbarians was originally set in Cape Town, that Michael K derives his initial from 18th century German author Heinrich von Kleist and that Coetzee wrote a never published novel called The Burning of the Books in which he discusses the dilemma of censorship. Face to Face with Time is a unique book on the authorship of JM Coetzee. For his devoted readers, for those who appreciate good literature and for writers who want to learn more about this fascinating creative process.
About the author
David Attwell (University of York) has written several books about and with JM Coetzee. JM Coetzee: South Africa and the Politics of Writing (1993) and Doubling the Point (1992). He has spend five weeks researching the 155 boxes of literary archive that is currently available at the Harry Ransom Centre at the University of Texas in Austin, USA. Face to Face with Time is the first book to feature detailed information from the various stages of JM Coetzee’s manuscripts.
Image courtesy Cultural Compass