It’s all gone a bit Coetzee-tastic around here. He’s the kind of author – Philip Roth is another – who can make you want to read absolutely everything he’s ever written once you get the taste. As well as being a brilliant novelist, Coetzee is also a world-class essayist, and Inner Workings is a collection of his essays from 2000 to 2005, most of them having been written for the New York Review of Books.
Coetzee is that rare thing: a writer who can get to the core of a topic with modesty, insight and economy. Much as I love Kundera’s essays, for example, you do occasionally want to punch him gently in the cock for sheer smugness. This never happens with Coetzee, who is a profound, subtle thinker, blessed with intellectual honesty of the highest order.
There are non duds here, and a few outstanding really essays, some of which I had read before, like his introduction to Robert Musil’s early novel The Confusions of Young Törless. As a linguist particularly adept in German, Coetzee is able to uncover details of various translations that would escape even the most perspicacious reviewer.
It’s pleasing to see that his views on Sàndor Màrai are similar to mine, although of course he gets far closer to the heart of both Embers and Esther’s Inheritance than I managed.
There are few slight errors – he describes Michael Hofmann as ‘British’ although he was in fact born in Germany, and his father was the German novelist Gert Hofman. It’s interesting that Coetzee criticises Hofmann’s translations of Joseph Roth’s short stories; I’ve never seen anything other than high praise for them.
This and other tiny niggles aside, this is a wonderful collection, with the essays on Günter Grass’s Crabwalk, Beckett’s shorter fiction, W.G. Sebald, Walt Whitman and Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America being particularly memorable.
Coetzee’s essays are every bit as brilliant as his fiction. His literary output is astonishing, both in quantity and quality. He’s fully deserving of the reputation he enjoys, and the lofty prizes he has been awarded. I’d read absolutely anything he wrote.
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