![]() ![]() I suspect that with these two it will indeed be ''or.'' Gordimer is expansive where Coetzee Sometimes two names can stand as alternatives: Tolstoy or Dostoyevsky, as George Steiner observed long ago. Literary history is full of pairs - think, say, of Whitman and Dickinson - whose names seem to complement each other. In this, Coetzee is very different from the other great South African novelist of our day, the Nobel laureate Nadine Gordimer. ![]() His country'sÄisgrace has always figured in his work, but, as you might expect from someone who wrote a dissertation on Beckett, it has most often figured obliquely. He has experimented with historical fiction and postmodern pastiche and has even, in the 1983 novel ''Life & Times of Michael K,'' written something like a fable. His earlier books, only the 1990 novel ''Age of Iron'' was set in a recognizable national present and even there he concentrated less on politics than on his cancer-stricken heroine's preparationsįor death. Coetzee has perhaps been unique in his unwillingness to write directly about life under apartheid. Christopher Lehmann-Haupt Reviews 'Disgrace' (Nov. ![]() Coetzee's, 'Disgrace' Wins Booker Prize (Oct. Coetzee's novel, one man's humiliation mirrors the plight of South Africa. ![]()
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