Diary of a Bad Year
Longlisted for the Australia Asia Literary Award
by J. M. Coetzee
Novelist Coetzee's 19th book features a stand-in for himself: Señor C, a white 72-year-old South African writer living in Australia who has written Waiting for the Barbarians. C falls into a metaphysical passion for his sexy 29-year-old Filipina neighbor, Anya, and quickly plots to spend more time with her by offering her a job as his typist. C's latest project is a series of political and philosophical essays, and Coetzee divides each page of the present novel in three: any given page features a bit of an essay (often its title and opening paragraph) at the top; C's POV in the middle; and Anya's voice at the bottom.
Diary of a Bad Year is an ingenious work that rivets the reader's attention, and it cannot have been easy to write.
It turns out in the end that Coetzee has written a sometimes sentimental love story that plays out nicely to the legato accompaniment of his pronouncements, political and cultural, some of which hit the bull's eye while some come to the verge of pomposity. I said "his pronouncements," but of course they are JC's essays, which is a reminder that not everything in Coetzee's novel is as it seems. Except this: Lovely Anya has her heart in the right place, and JC is lucky enough to understand that. Is the experimental form the story took a success? I was amused and at the same time hoped that the marvelously inventive Mr. Coetzee will move beyond it.
