Three Stories
J. M. Coetzee
Language: English
Pages: 20
ISBN: 2:00318074
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
A man contemplates his deep connection to a house.
The unfathomable idea of threshing wheat points to a life lost.
And a writer ponders the creation of his narrator.
Three Stories—‘His Man and He’, written as Coetzee’s acceptance speech for the Nobel Prize for Literature, ‘A House in Spain’ and ‘Nietverloren’—is the work of a master at his peak. These are stories that embody the essence of our existence.
J.M. Coetzee was the first author to win the Booker Prize twice and was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2003. His work includes Waiting for the Barbarians, Life and Times of Michael K, The Master of Petersburg, Disgrace, Diary of a Bad Year and most recently, The Childhood of Jesus. He lives in Adelaide.
‘All [the stories are] impeccably crafted and a joy to read, with the book itself beautifully presented in duck egg blue and inlaid gold too.’ New Daily
‘For all the sharpness and sorrow of Coetzee’s writing, there is something grandly calming about his style: his sentences seem to give off light, and not in a hard dazzle, but in the glow of a child’s night-light.’ Age/Sydney Morning Herald
‘Coetzee’s strength as a writer is such that each of the stories is engaging, thought-provoking and highly readable.’ West Australian
has had a fondness for Spain, the Spain of taciturn pride and old formalities. (Does he love Spain? At least love of a country, a people, a way of life, is not some newfangled notion.) If he is going to spend more and more of his time in Spain, it makes sense to have a place he can call his own, a home where the linen and the kitchenware are familiar and he doesn’t have to clean up other people’s messes. Of course one does not need to own Spanish property to spend time in Spain. One can work
compact says, he should bring profit to the local people: buy from the local merchants, give work to the local artisans. The work he is doing on the house belongs by right to those artisans. But on this point he will not yield. What he is engaged in is more serious than mere upkeep. It is intimate work, work he must do with his own hands. In time, he hopes, the local people will come to understand. The village, of course, has memories of the house from before his time, and before the time of Sr
even the lizards took shelter under stones? Would the fairies have enough sense to hide under stones too, or would they lie panting among the thornbushes, longing for England? He asked his mother about the circle. Is it a fairy circle, he demanded? It can only be a fairy circle, she replied. He was not convinced. They were visitors on the farm, though not particularly welcome visitors. They visited because they were family, and family were always entitled to visit. This particular visit had
growing more and more crabby about language, about slack usage, falling standards. Falling in love, for instance. “We fell in love with the house,” friends of his say. How can you fall in love with a house when the house cannot love you back, he wants to reply? Once you start falling in love with objects, what will be left of real love, love as it used to be? But no one seems to care. People fall in love with tapestries, with old cars. He would like to dismiss it, this neologism, this novelty,
until the plague descends upon the city, it is the year 1665, the great fire of London has not yet come. The plague descends upon London: daily, parish by parish, the count of the dead mounts, rich and poor, for the plague makes no distinction among stations, all this saddler’s worldly wealth will not save him. He sends his wife and daughters into the countryside and makes plans to flee himself, but then does not. Thou shalt not be afraid for the terror at night, he reads, opening the Bible at