Diary of a Bad Year by J.M Coetzee

When you read a Coetzee, you have to ask yourself, how far can you take the art of compression in a novel--if this book can be called a novel in the first place. First thing that struck me when I flipped it open: two horizontal bars invariably on each page, demarcating three journals of two different characters involved in the story. The three-in-one gets rather annoying, especially when the narrative breaks off mid-sentence and continues on the next page--you're not sure whether to flip over and continue or skip to the section below first, which continues the second character's story.

Not that there's much of a story. The plot is relatively simple, involving only three characters. An old, dying writer who is attracted to a young Filipina, Anya,his neighbour. He engages her as his typist for a series of opinion pieces; she has a boyfriend, Alan, who wants to cheat him of his money. The story is actually sidelined for the opinion pieces, which appear in the first bar, followed by the journals of the nameless writer and woman. I was not a Coetzee fan, after Waiting For The Barbarians and Disgrace but for Diary I respect the careful crafting that went into developing the characters' stories as an ironical counterpoint to the writer's opinions on authority, political responsibility and social conscience. While such grandiose themes were being proclaimed, the journals reveal a writer on shaky ground, unsure if he is able to finish his task before he can no longer write. The personal histories of the three ask questions of personal ethics and individual conscience, and the irritating yoking together of these seemingly disparate themes, without saying as much, forces the reader to consider the relationships between the individual and the history he is born into--whether we owe the world an apology, not for who we are but for where we come from and who we're with, just as Anya feels she owes JC (the only name appearing for the writer--probably Coetzee writing as himself) an apology for her boyfriend's desire to cheat him.

(Spoiler alert!) I accuse Coetzee of unabashed reader manipulation when several empty slots in the writer's journal towards the end caused me to think the persona had died or just given up writing--but fortunately he does reappear, only for Anya's journal to start revealing her fantasy on saying the best goodbye to him at his deathbed: "sweet dreams, and flights of angels, and all the rest," she would wish to say. By that time the writer, through the twenty-odd opinion pieces we have read, has come to embody the best aspirations of humanist modernism, the search for humanity's transcendence or rebirth, for a united push to seek a way of living approved by the conscience. But the book is written during the Iraq war, post September 11, and during the Guantanamo Bay exposure, and makes clear that there is no escaping a scarred conscience. It seems to simultaneously attempt to reclaim those visions as well as sound a death knell for modernism, while searching hesitantly for an ethic, a moral framework, for a very different world--the world of Alan, the rapacious and remorseless investor, and of Anya, his pleasure-seeking, materialistic girlfriend.

All in all, a book worth looking into.