Coetzee sobre Walser

"On Christmas Day, 1956, the police of the town of Herisau in eastern Switzerland were called out: children had stumbled upon the body of a man, frozen to death, in a snowy field. Arriving at the scene, the police took photographs and had the body removed.

The dead man was easily identified: Robert Walser, aged seventy-eight, missing from a local mental hospital. In his earlier years Walser had won something of a reputation, in Switzerland and even in Germany, as a writer. Some of his books were still in print; there had even been a biography of him published. During a quarter of a century in mental institutions, however, his own writing had dried up. Long country walks—like the one on which he had died—had been his main recreation."

Continuar a ler aqui.

Dois mistérios para Coetzee em "The adventures of Augie March"

Mr. Coetzee asked about two allusions in The Adventures of Augie March: “Who was it, for example, who was set on a horse by his weeping sisters to go and study Greek in Bogotá? What ambassador from what country blew shellac through the water pipes of Lima to stop the rust?”

Neste artigo se conta de como Coetzee veio a beber cházinho com a menina encarregada de lhe censurar os livros

When Big Brother regimes crumble, they sometimes leave an unintended paper trail, a pathway into the dark tradecraft of oppression.
After the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, for just one example, many Germans discovered from files kept on them that children or spouses had spied on them for the Stasi secret police. And in Romania, Doru Pavaloiae, an economist, learned that a man he thought of as a friend, a popular singer in his hometown, was an informer — code name: Minstrel — for the feared Securitate.

The Making of Beckett

Em Abril de 2009, Coetzee comentou o primeiro volume do epistolário de Beckett, publicado pela Cambridge University Press. Embora o ensaio já tenha uns meses, vale a pena ler «The Making of Beckett», aqui.