Commentaries and Readings - DOI: 10.4025/actascilangcult.v31i1.5880

Résumé

“Austro-Hungary is no more. I do not want to live anywhere else […] I shall live on with the torso and imagine that it is the whole” (p. 79). This quotation from Sigmund Freud’s diary appears in an essay on the Austrian writer, Joseph Roth, in John Maxwell Coetzee’s latest collection of critical essays. Coetzee has never displayed much enthusiasm for post-colonial studies, but his latest collection of critical essays, the first since Stranger Shores (2001), and the first since his voluntary exile from post-apartheid South Africa to Australia, reveals a new interest in post-colonial themes. As was the case with his earlier volume the majority of the essays first appeared in the New York Review of Books, but the new collection shows a marked shift in interest away from Africa towards the wider world, to central Europe, the United States, South America and the West Indies. More than a third of the essays in the earlier collection dealt with African authors and topics, but only one essay in the new collection, a study of South Africa’s other literary Nobel laureate, Nadine Gordimer, does.