Alert! Today is Nobel literature laureate JM Coetzee’s 70th birthday. He was born on 9 Feb 1940 in Cape Town, and his fruitful life as a writer has brought him not just the Nobel, but two Man Booker prizes among countless other literary awards. South Africans on the Afrikaans litwatch seem more invested in the significance of the date than others – see these links – but with this post BOOK SA joins the, erm, fun.
To mark Coetzee’s 70th, we thought it a good idea to pull out one of his less well-known works and give it a thumbing. In my estimation, The Master of Petersburg is one of Coetzee’s greatest novels – it surely must rank within the top three – but despite its quality and the bracing, almost gnomic challenges to the intellect that it presents, it languishes in relative obscurity.
In sum, the novel tells the tale of how Fyodor Dostoevsky, who has secretly returned to Petersburg to look into the death of his son (he’s a fugitive from creditors who financed his gambling habit; he mustn’t be caught by them), becomes the novelist who writes The Possessed – that magisterial work, centred on the tortured “nihilist” Nikolai Vsevolodovich Stavrogin, about the psyche of revolutionaries.
The pressure of art that is brought to bear on Dostoevsky in the midst of his trials of grief is rendered implacably by Coetzee. As his character tries to unravel the mystery behind his son’s death, seeking out perhaps the most dangerous man in the city, Nechaev (a true nihilist), his writer’s imagination captiously records and stores details for uses independent of the current mission, and, indeed, independent of Dostoevsky’s needs and feelings. It’s an almost monstrous turning of the screws – Doestoevsky becomes the one who is possessed, both by the quest for his son’s secret, and by his almost inhuman need to “make use of” this quest for a mere tale.
The Master of Petersburg, then, is Coetzee’s definitive statement on the power – or perhaps “grip” is the better word – of art. The novel, published in 1994, appears between Age of Iron (1990) and Boyhood (1997). On this 70th birthday of the Master of Cape Town and now Adelaide, BOOK SA recommends that its readers schedule the novel into their 2010 lists.
As it happens, the book is available, complete and for free, at Scribd:
J.M. Coetzee – The Master of Petersburg
You have to think that it won’t be online in this form for long, so perhaps get reading sooner rather than later!
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