tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-688274121226963086.post5497131952722552542..comments2023-10-22T23:29:48.012+13:00Comments on O Audacious Book: Auckland Writers and Readers Festival Highs & LowsUnknownnoreply@blogger.comBlogger2125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-688274121226963086.post-4104472811525642142008-05-20T17:28:00.000+12:002008-05-20T17:28:00.000+12:00Thank you anonymous. Your post is very interesting...Thank you anonymous. Your post is very interesting. I think Coetzee would have been appalled by some of the sessions at the Writers Festival then. It makes you wonder why he agrees to come to such things. I have to say I like the fact that he disconcerts the media who manage to woo the other 99% of us.Mary McCallumhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/07482261103185786111noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-688274121226963086.post-20059066714697336652008-05-20T04:32:00.000+12:002008-05-20T04:32:00.000+12:00JM Coetzee -- "An interview is not just, as you c...JM Coetzee -- "An interview is not just, as you call it, an 'exchange': it is, nine times out of 10 (this is the 10th case, thank God!), an exchange with a complete stranger, yet a stranger permitted by the conventions of the genre to cross the boundaries of what is proper in conversation between strangers. I don't regard myself as a public figure, a figure in the public domain. I dislike the violation of propriety, to say nothing of the violation of private space, that occurs in the typical interview."<BR/><BR/>He goes on to say he does not like to surrender control. "Writers are used to being in control of the text and don't resign it easily." He derides the notion that in an interview a writer can suddenly reveal his innermost secrets. "In the transports of unrehearsed speech, the subject utters truths unknown to his waking self ", as he puts it. "To me," writes Coetzee, "truth is related to silence, to reflection, to the practice of writing. Speech is not a fount of truth but a pale and provisional version of writing."<BR/><BR/>Wearily, he admits to a reputation among journalists as "an evasive, arrogant, unpleasant customer" . Nobody who saw his wonderfully taciturn appearance on Newsnight when he won the Booker for Disgrace, being interrogated by the hapless Kirsty Wark, will have forgotten it. It is rare to see such unyieldingness - such a stone - on television.<BR/><BR/>Journalists have exacted revenge. After he won the Nobel, a vicious article appeared in the South African Sunday Times claiming to reveal "The secret life of JM Coetzee" (his divorce, the death of his son, a squabble in the University of Cape Town English department, his love of long-distance cycle racing).<BR/><BR/>Another piece in the same paper called him "a charlatan", denouncing his writing as "lifeless", his vision as "repellent". Coetzee's books are treated as no more than evidence for his own pathology.Anonymousnoreply@blogger.com