Author’s journey into life under globalisation

Title: Diary of a Bad Year

Author: JM Coetzee

Publisher: Harvill Secker

Published: 2007

Reviewer: Tom Odhiambo

Critics are increasingly casting JM Coetzee, a South African literary maestro, now living in Australia, as a citizen of the world.

I guess a Nobel laureate automatically assumes citizenship beyond one’s country of origin. However, it is still significant to see Coetzee as an African author despite his global outlook.

Diary of a Bad Year is an ageing man’s reflection on his life — past, immediate and beyond. The purported 72-year-old author is writing for a forthcoming book under the rubric Strong Opinions to be published in Germany with contributions from six authors from various countries. They have been asked to write on ‘any subject, the more contentious the better.’

Living alone in an apartment block, the author uses the opportunity offered by the compilers of the anthology to "express his fairly strong opinions" about his country and the world.

Multiple styles

Unable to type the text, the old man offers a young woman (Anya, living with a stockbroker called Alan) residing in the same apartment block a chance to type for him. It is in this relationship that unravels in the washroom between the old man and the young woman that Coetzee explores a range of themes using multiple styles.

There are the bits of conversations between the old man and the young woman that enable the two to indulge in some kind of flirtation. There are also Anya’s own musings about the old man, her conversations with Alan, the old man’s thoughts on his life and his relationship with Anya and the different ‘opinion’ pieces on a wide range of subjects.

The text is graphically divided into two and then three separate interrelated narratives. The different parts carry their own narrative weight, voice and themes.

The book imposes a demanding reading regime on readers. To follow the multiple narratives, the reader may have to go back and forth to seek the narrative connectors between different and competing texts. Although it would be imprecise to refer to the ‘opinion’ essays as the main text of the book, they contain the primary entries in the ‘diary’. Coetzee uses the opinions to voice his philosophical take on a range of topics that are of contemporary global interest.

For instance, as a professor, he presents his views on higher learning institutions and the ‘market-driven agenda’ that has watered their value.

He writes: "It was always a bit of a lie that universities were self-governing institutions. Nevertheless, what universities suffered during the 1980s and 1990s was pretty shameful, as under threat of having their funding cut they allowed themselves to be turned into business enterprises, in which professors who had previously carried on their enquiries in sovereign freedom were transformed into harried employees required to fulfil quotas under the scrutiny of professional managers. "

Which African professor would disagree with such analysis?

Hidden meanings

And what does the author have to say about post-modernist literary tendencies and their obsession with texts and meanings beyond what can be reasonably adduced from textual evidence?

He narrates the trial of "four young American Muslims on trial for planning an attack on Disneyland" as presented in a BBC documentary about America’s continued projection of Al Qaeda as a terrorist organisation. Prosecutors’ evidence that is simply amateurish.

He asks: "Where did the prosecutors learn to think in such a way?"

The answer: In US literature classes of the 1980s and 1990s where they were taught that in criticism, suspicion is the chief virtue. That the critic must accept nothing at face value. From their exposure to literary theory, these not-so-bright graduates of Humanities in its postmodernist phase bore away a set of analytical instruments, which they obscurely sensed could be useful outside the classroom, and an intuition that the ability to argue that ‘nothing is as it seems to be’ might get you places.

"You have been warned, those disciples of subversive texts full of ‘hidden meanings!" writes the author.

It may not be a worthwhile exercise to seek to classify Diary of a Bad Year. Perhaps, it is best to simply read it as a ‘diary’ in which the author enters his thoughts and experiences as they happen. But it is this apparent lack of textual uniformity that challenges us to read the book as a human-interest story.

—Dr Tom Odhiambo ([email protected]) researches and teaches literature and communication.