Diary of a Bad Year

A new work of fiction by the Nobel Prize-winning author of Disgrace.

In this brilliant new work of fiction, J. M. Coetzee once again breaks new literary ground with a book that is, in the words of its main character, "a response to the present in which I find myself." Diary of a Bad Year takes on the world of politics — a new topic for Coetzee — and explores the role of the writer in our times with an extraordinary moral compass.

At the center of the book is "Señor C," an aging author who has been asked to write his thoughts on the state of the world by his German publisher. These thoughts, called "Strong Opinions," address a wide range of subjects and include a scathing indictment of Bush, Cheney, and Blair, as well as a witheringly honest examination of everything from Machiavelli and the current state of the university to music, literature, and intelligent design, offering unexpected perceptions and insightful arguments along the way.

Meanwhile, someone new enters the writer's life: Anya, the beautiful young woman whom he hires to type his manuscript. The relationship that develops between Señor C and Anya has a profound effect on both of them. It also changes the course of Anya's relationship with Alan, the successful, swaggering man whom she lives with — and who has designs on Señor C's bank account.

Through these characters, Coetzee creates an ingenious literary game that will enthrall readers and surprise them with its emotional power. Bold, funny, and sad, as well as intellectually clever and satisfying, Diary of a Bad Year is a journey into the mind and heart of one of the world's most acclaimed and accomplished writers.

"Nobelist 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. C's opinions in the essays are mostly on the left (he despises Bush, Blair & Co., and is opposed to the Iraq War) and they bore Anya, who wants something less lofty. Meanwhile, Anya's lover, Alan — a smart, conservative 42-year-old investment consultant who's good in the sack, and who stands for everything C despises — becomes increasingly scornful and jealous, and eventually concocts an elaborate plan to defraud C. of money. Unfortunately, Anya is little more than a trophy to be disputed, and Alan as an unscrupulous, boorish reactionary is a caricature. While C's essays, especially the later ones inspired by Anya, hold some interest, this follow-up to Slow Year is not one of Coetzee's major efforts." Publishers Weekly (Copyright Reed Business Information, Inc.)

"J.M. Coetzee is a great novelist, perhaps the greatest writing today, and has garnered just about every important prize awarded for fiction written in English, including the Nobel Prize for Literature. By common consent his most powerful work is 'Disgrace,' published in 1999, in form an old fashioned realistic novel that one can readily imagine having been written by Dostoevsky, Coetzee's acknowledged... Washington Post Book Review (read the entire Washington Post review) master, if the terrifying event at the center of its plot — the gang rape of a young lesbian in the South African bush — were transposed to Russia during one of its periods of violence and chaos. Coetzee's previous novels, 'Waiting for the Barbarians' (1980), 'Age of Iron' (1990) and 'The Master of Petersburg' (1994) among them, are likewise in the realist tradition. They are stories plausible enough for the reader to accept them as true. To quote the protagonist of Coetzee's new novel, 'Diary of a Bad Year,' such stories 'tell themselves, they don't get told.' The author doesn't intrude in the space between the version of reality he has created and the reader, or otherwise take the risk of breaking the spell he has cast.

Since 'Disgrace,' however, Coetzee has been engaged in a fascinating effort to bend the realist novel into a new medium. 'Diary of a Bad Year' is the most recent example of that enterprise; the mesmerizing and beautiful novel 'Elizabeth Costello' (2003) was the first. In the latter work Coetzee introduced an alter ego, a famous female writer, born in 1928, and the author of nine novels, a volume of poems, a book on birds and a body of journalism — an oeuvre closely corresponding to Coetzee's. We see her deliver seven lectures. Among them: one on the novel, two on animal rights (these were in fact given by Coetzee at Princeton) and one on Eros as it affects men and gods. The last chapter is a retelling of the parable of the Law in Kafka's 'Trial.'

Elizabeth Costello came back on stage, as though to take a bow, in an exquisite chapter-length sequel to the novel that appeared in 2005 in the New York Review of Books, and again, much more substantially, in the novel 'Slow Man,' also published that year. There Costello literally moves in with the protagonist, a 60-something man by the name of Rayment, living alone in Adelaide, Australia. Rayment had never met Costello before, and she is not a welcome or easy guest. But she is obsessed with him, and the difficulty she faces is that he won't cooperate. He refuses to undertake anything that makes the protagonist of a novel photogenic, such as making love to the three women who are in all likelihood available or, for that matter, Costello herself. 'Slow Man' — with its slow protagonist — can be seen as a novelist's interaction with the characters of a novel that is still a work in progress and may not turn out as had been intended.

The obduracy of invented characters can be very real. The novelist comes across them somewhere in the zone of imagination and, because of a mysterious affinity, invites them to come aboard. They do — and misbehave. Coetzee's surrogate in 'Diary of a Bad Year' is JC (two of Coetzee's initials), another very distinguished novelist but this time originally South African, laden with honors, born in 1934 (Coetzee was born in 1940), and now living in Sydney (Coetzee, like Rayment, lives in Adelaide). Asked why he isn't writing a novel instead of the string of little essays to be published in Germany as 'Strong Opinions,' JC answers, 'I don't have the endurance any more. To write a novel you have to be like Atlas, holding up the whole world on your shoulders and supporting it there for months and years while its affairs work themselves out. It is too much for me as I am today.'

JC and Coetzee may be protesting too much. 'Diary of a Bad Year' is an ingenious work that rivets the reader's attention, and it cannot have been easy to write. The top third of each page is occupied by the essays that JC is writing for a German publisher.

The middle third of the page tells the story of JC's relationship with Anya, a Philippine-Australian beauty he meets in his building's basement laundry room. In the manner of old men who have loved women, he feels an immediate flash of desire, but, cagy and reasonable, he resists temptation. Instead of making a pass or venturing a proposition, he engages her to type the essays he dictates into a recording machine. Her secretarial skills aren't much, but she becomes his Segretaria, his Secret Aria, an echo of Humbert Humbert's string of endearing names for Lolita. When they discuss his work, she bosses him around, adding to his infatuation.

On the bottom third of each page appears a running commentary by Anya on JC and on her own live-in affair with Alan, and also Alan's comments to Anya on JC. Alan is an Australian yob who has worked his way to being a financial consultant; in his case that may mean he is a crook. He has planted spyware on the hard drive of JC's computer, which reports on everything JC confides to his computer, especially his finances. Alan's Thatcherite lucubrations are a counterpoint for JC's sometimes quirky and more often predictable worldview: JC distrusts democracy and deplores the decline of Australian political life, loathes George W. Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld, feels shame descending upon him when he thinks of Guantanamo and Americans' use of torture. Alan, we soon learn, has concocted a larcenous scheme designed to get his hands on JC's money. Anya's response is somber and unequivocal: She will stand by her JC. More than that, she will be there to hold his hand and give him a kiss when the end comes, 'just to remind him of what he is leaving behind.'

So 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.

Louis Begley is the author of eight novels, the most recent of which is 'Matters of Honor.'"

Reviewed by Louis Begley, Washington Post Book World (Copyright 2006 Washington Post Book World Service/Washington Post Writers Group)
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"[A] brilliantly modulated convergence of divergent points of views....[Coetzee] is funny, relaxed, and excoriating in this shrewdly charming novel about deception and integrity, shame and dishonor, crime and punishment, beauty and kindness." Booklist

"There's something wrong with a novel in which a twisted, exploitative sexual relationship is far less interesting than are dozens of pages of discursive commentary. But that's the new, improved Coetzee for you. Maybe we should blame the Swedish Academy." Kirkus Reviews

"As Anya remarks, we've all got opinions, but if you tell a story at least people will shut up and listen to you. Nobel prize winner Coetzee's thought-provoking and cerebral novel is recommended." Library Journal

"J. M. Coetzee's novel Diary of a Bad Year is something of a self-managed funeral, but a lavish one: mordant, funny and wise....'Why should not old men be mad?' Yeats wrote. In his comic, witty and compassionate novel Mr. Coetzee tells us why not." Richard Eder, The New York Times

"The elements are so compelling...that it's not easy to pin down precisely why they don't come together as a whole....Diary of a Bad Year, for all its careful craft, draws us in just to put us off again. You can hear Coetzee's unmistakable voice, but this time around you may have trouble overhearing it." Minneapolis Star Tribune

"Contemporizing and extemporizing in ways that make Diary of a Bad Year feel very unlike a novel and more like diffuse commentary, Coetzee has created a clever superstructure filled with philosophical self-interrogation on questions of political, artistic and erotic moralities." Los Angeles Times

"This novel's fall from the grace of a purely imagined world is a matter of self-conscious nakedness, of insisting we see undisguised rhetorical tricks we might prefer cloaked with artifice." Kathryn Harrison, The New York Times Book Review

"[T]here is some sense in which reading this book may be as close to a personal conversation with J. M. Coetzee as any of us is likely to get....Taken together, these essays create a compelling, even lovable, portrait of a chilly and curmudgeonly aging writer." Claire Messud, The Boston Globe

"The essays become a bit tedious; the political opinions offer few insights into contemporary topics that haven't already been voiced around the world....The contrast of the forms helps to keep the pace moving and breathes life into the slow sections." Rocky Mountain News

"Diary of a Bad Year is a loud book, filled with both verve for life and the enervating prospect of death. It's one of his more approachable reads, and it is a mark of Coetzee's talent that he is able to enmesh the philistine with the profound with such enviable ease." Chicago Sun-Times

The latest by the Nobel Prize-winning author of Disgrace is an utterly contemporary work of fiction that addresses the profound unease of countless people in democracies across the world.

J. M. Coetzee was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2003. He has won many other literary awards, including the Booker Prize (twice), the Lannan Literary Award, the Irish Times International Fiction Prize, the Commonwealth Writers Prize, and South Africa's premier literary award, the CNA Prize. The author of eighteen books, he is a native of South Africa, and now lives in Australia.