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| Reuters |
| J.M. Coetzee in 1999. |
PARIS, Oct. 2 — John Maxwell Coetzee, a widely acclaimed South African novelist who has often used his country's apartheid system and its post-apartheid transition to mirror the bleakness of the human condition, was awarded the 2003 Nobel Prize for literature today by the Swedish Academy in Stockholm.
Mr. Coetzee, 63, who has long been considered a contender for the $1.3 million prize, became Africa's fourth Nobel literature laureate, after Wole Soyinka of Nigeria in 1986, Naguib Mahfouz of Egypt in 1988 and Nadine Gordimer of South Africa in 1991. This year's other Nobel prizes will be announced next week, including the Peace Prize on Oct. 10.
In its citation, the 18-member academy pointed to the broad sweep of Mr. Coetzee's fiction. "A fundamental theme in Coetzee's novels involves the values and conduct resulting from South Africa's apartheid system, which, in his view, could arise anywhere," it said.
The academy praised the "well-crafted composition, pregnant dialogue and analytical brilliance" of Mr. Coetzee's novels. "But at the same time," it said, "he is a scrupulous doubter, ruthless in his criticism of the cruel rationalism and cosmetic morality of Western civilization." And it added: "It is in exploring weakness and defeat that Coetzee captures the divine spark in man."
Mr. Coetzee's best-known novels are "Waiting for the Barbarians;" "Life and Times of Michael K," which won the Booker Prize in Britain in 1983; "The Master of Petersburg," and "Disgrace," which was also awarded the Booker Prize in 1999, making Mr. Coetzee the first writer to win it twice. He has also published books of essays and two memoirs, "Boyhood" and "Youth."
A tall slim man with a neatly-trimmed white beard, Mr. Coetzee (pronounced kut-SEE-uh) belongs to a generation of South African writers — Alan Paton, Dennis Brutus, Athol Fugard and Ms. Gordimer among them — who raised their voices against apartheid. But unlike some of his colleagues who campaigned actively against the racist system, Mr. Coetzee has always shied from the limelight and rarely gives interviews.
Typically, he did not attend the Booker award ceremonies, and the Swedish Academy was also unable to find him to inform him of the Nobel prize before it was announced. He learned of the award in Chicago this morning.
"I received the news in a phone call from Stockholm at 6 a.m.," Mr. Coetzee said in a statement issued by the University of Chicago, where he is teaching a seminar at the Committee on Social Thought. "It came as a complete surprise. I was not even aware that the announcement was pending."
Ms. Gordimer was among writers and critics praising the choice. "He's a colleague and a friend and it is a wonderful thing that the Nobel Prize has come to South Africa again," she was quoted as telling The Associated Press.
The reaction in South Africa underscored a long debate over his career. Admirers there view Mr. Coetzee as unflinchingly honest in his portrayal of the nation's racial and political conflicts before and after apartheid. His critics say he made a name for himself by sensationalizing South Africa's violence and then abandoned the country.
Stephen Gray, a South African poet, said Mr. Coetzee's decision to emigrate to Australia fueled the debate about whether he was loyal to South Africa. While some writers felt that South Africa needed them to work actively for change, he said, Mr. Coetzee always remained very aloof. "Most sophisticated readers think of him as writer who writes for overseas," he said.
While Mr. Coetzee is very much a South African writer, his peripatetic and often reclusive life may have served his fiction by giving him a certain distance from the troubles of his home country. After graduating from college in South Africa in 1961 with a degree in mathematics, he followed the example of many white liberal intellectuals and traveled to Britain, where he worked as a computer programmer.
Four years later, he moved to the United States and taught English while doing graduate studies at the University of Texas in Austin. From 1968, he taught literature at the State University of New York at Buffalo before returning home in 1983 to become professor of English literature at the University of Cape Town. In 2002, he moved to Australia, where he is an honorary research fellow at the University of Adelaide.
Yet South Africa's apartheid trauma haunts his novels, even when they appear to be set in a different country. In "Dusklands," his first novel, published in 1974, the protagonist is an American working on psychological warfare during the Vietnam War. But as the man's personal life disintegrates, he is confronted by a report about 18th-century Boer pioneers setting out to conquer and colonize South Africa.
In a sense, Mr. Coetzee himself personifies the split personality of South Africa's white population. Although raised in an Afrikaans-speaking family in Cape Town, he attended an English school. But while English then became his first language, he is fluent in Afrikaans. And he has sometimes defended Afrikaners against the stereotype of being uniformly racist and, as he once put it, "notably intolerant in their attitudes, heartless in their conduct or indolent in their daily life."
In his novels, Mr. Coetzee turns an existentialist spotlight on individual behavior. "At the decisive moment, Coetzee's characters stand behind themselves, motionless, incapable of taking part in their own actions," the Swedish Academy noted. "But passivity is not merely the dark haze that devours personality, it is also the last resort open to human beings as they defy an oppressive order by rendering themselves inaccessible to its intentions."
In a rare interview with The Associated Press in 1990, Mr. Coetzee explained it more simply. "Our history is such that all of a sudden ordinary people are confronted with major decisions In a way that ordinary people are usually not faced by," he said. "I think South Africa in the past 40 years has been a place where people have been faced with really huge, moral debts."
"Disgrace," Mr. Coetzee's most powerful novel about the post-apartheid South Africa, tells of a Cape Town university professor's dismissal from his job after his affair with a young student becomes known. David Lurie, the professor, then withdraws to the small farm of his daughter, Lucy, who is raped by three black strangers. Horrified, David wants to call the police, but Lucy asks him to tell no one of the rape and her subsequent pregnancy.
The parallel between a South Africa trying to build hope amid social confusion becomes clear when David asks Lucy if she can love the child she is carrying. "The child? No. How could I? But I will. Love will grow — one can trust Mother Nature for that. I am determined to be a good mother, David. A good mother and a good person. You should try to be a good person too."
The book struck a particularly sensitive nerve in a nation fearful that racial tensions are at the heart of violence against white farmers.
"The novel was not politically correct," said Tim du Plessis, editor of the Sunday newspaper Rapport, published in Afrikaans. "Some thought South Africa didn't need a renowned author sending out a negative message about the country at that time."
In Mr. Coetzee's latest book, "Elizabeth Costello: Eight Lessons," published this year, the main narrative follows an imaginary Australian writer who is in demand as a speaker, yet struggles to make herself understood and "no longer believes that storytelling is good in itself."
Mr. Coetzee himself, though, does not appear that pessimistic. "I am working on new fiction and I have a book of translations of Dutch poets due out shortly," he said in the statement after learning of the Nobel prize. But, true to character, he offered no elaboration.
