Diatribe #2

I finished the novel and still find it, overall, lacking in literary merit and definitely unworthy of the Nobel prize. Although I had made a false assumption in my previous post, where I assumed that the first prostitute that Luri sleeps with is a suburban housewife, an uncertainty due to the unreliable narrator, Luri, I still stand by everything else that I wrote.

Whether the boy is Petrus's actual in-law is still an open question, as Petrus is unreliable himself; and his comment about "his people" may lead to the inference that he is lying about his familial ties to the boy. Lucy still never challenges her father's idea that black South Africans are out for revenge, helping to create a view that this is the common reality of South Africa, which is implied to extend beyond the particular characters and their particular circumstances.

Evidence of a third person selectively omniscient narrator is on page 142-3, "One Sunday evening, driving home in Lucy's kombi, he actually has to stop at the roadside to recover himself. Tears flow down his face that he cannot stop; his hands shake."

The novel is full of cliches, unoriginal themes, and a character driven plot that does not go anywhere near the psychological depths of masters like Dostoevsky (who it seems Coetzee admires), Kafka or Nabokov, to name but a few. He does offer one significant psychological insight, the under the surface hidden racism of Lurie, covered over with self-deception, through a conscious focus on language. As well as Luri's insensitivity to women, who he uses to fulfill "aesthetic," erotic desires.

There are some other highlights in the novel, a few insights here and there, the classroom scene on Wordsworth, some of the tragically disconnected and depressing sexual scenes - albeit, cliche and nowhere near the level of a Kafka -- each worthy to make a good short story, but when taken together, an altogether badly woven novel. Of course, the one standout passage, Lurie imaginaing being raped by referencing a surgical metaphor is well rendered and poetic.

The scenes on Byron were fairly interesting, but nowhere near as well executed as masters like Calvino and Winterson are able to do when employing historical fictional techniques (Invisible Cities; The Passion). Many lines are downright terrible, unlike the back-cover of the novel which quotes one reviewer stating that this is "spare prose" . . . spare me: "This is what he is becoming: stupid, daft, wrongheaded." What insightful, illuminating, enlightening, redundancy.

The rhythmic qualities of the prose are excellent -- alternating pace, keeping readers engaged, at least this one, most of the time. The plot, however, is unrealistic, the coincidences, the two sisters, the larceny and robbery, the two rapes, fail to strike me as a believable fictional world. Lastly, the dialogue is far from perfect, many times falling into literary posturing rather than realistic vernacular: "[...] your name is mud [...]". (189).