The common thread that leaps out of Coetzee’s work is not so much the gulf between men and women as the gulf between two incompatible life-paths, the path of surrender and the path of appetites. Again and again, his books put these two ways of living in opposition – one character will be passionate, lusty, engaged, hungry, while the other will be austere, self-denying, detached, finding virtue in deserts and silence and small things. David Lurie and his daughter in Disgrace; Paul Rayment and Elizabeth Costello in Slow Man; the concentration camp doctor and Michael K in Life and Times of Michael K. Or, to use examples Coetzee has used, Byron and Jesus.
One way of reading Summertime is as a confession, an acknowledgement to women Coetzee has loved, of this double nature.
We’ve become so used to the American and Irish novelists polishing their sentences till they glitter with ingenious similes and wise passions that the notion of another kind of poetic prose, one where the poetry is in the larger structure rather than word by word, seems alien now. But that is what Occupied City is, and perhaps the novel as collection-of-poems-and-prose is where a novelist takes shelter during the periods when the prose can’t seem to take the weight of the stories any more.
Even here in Ajegunle, the biggest, toughest inner-city slum in Lagos, the plot where the unfinished church stands is valuable as building land. Once there was a government plan to raze Ajegunle and let its residents scatter as best they could. It wasn’t carried out; but Ajegunle has never sensed more nervously the heave and crush of the vast, taut metropolis coiled around it, straining against its bounds. Nigeria is Africa’s most populous country, and if Lagos hasn’t yet overtaken Cairo as Africa’s biggest city, it will. The dread of sudden eviction chafes deep into the already hard dollar-a-day lives of the people who call Ajegunle home.
"Nowadays," wrote Saul Bellow in his novel Humboldt's Gift, "the categories are grasped by those who belong to them." It's not just that we see the economic crisis rearing up out of the sea in the distance, like a slow-motion tsunami from which, despite its creeping speed, we cannot escape. What makes the situation peculiar is that the crisis that threatens us also seems to be us; we are simultaneously menaced by the wave, and exist as elements of the wave.
Overnight, the waters around Mythe rose with a speed that staggered the flood specialists. At 1.48 a.m. on Saturday, 21 July, the gauge readings began to shoot up almost vertically. In the next seven hours, the water rose 4.4 metres. Soon afterwards, with the water still rising, the gauge broke...
James Kelman’s ‘Kieron Smith, Boy’
In Kieron Smith, you see as in no previous Kelman novel how much the honesty and rigour of Kelman the writer have priority over the personal beliefs of Kelman the public speaker, interviewee and polemical writer. It is not that the one contradicts the other, but that, by having a child as his hero, the anger of Kelman the social critic, believably passaged into the thoughts and words of the central characters of his earlier novels, no longer has a place...
I was sad to hear this week that a campaign had been launched to save the postcard, because I love sending and getting postcards, and campaigns to save dying social institutions tend to be launched when the institutions are all but dead to the herd already. Announcing a "campaign to save the..." acts like an invisible tag, announcing to society at large that the Great British whatever-it-is is crippled, stale, beginning to stink, and that the rest of us had best keep clear if we want to avoid being tainted with the pheromones of lameness...
On the afternoon of March 31 2000, Boris Pasternak, editor-in-chief of the Moscow publishing house Polifakt, drove to the suburb of Podolsk to look up one of his authors, the food writer and historian Vilyam Pokhlebkin. Pokhlebkin was late delivering the final manuscript of his new book, A Century Of Cooking, and had failed either to turn up for a scheduled meeting or to respond to telegrams. The writer had no phone. He had no fridge or TV, either, although he did have 50,000 books crammed into his apartment...
The hardest part of this confession has already been made. It is easier to admit an unwelcome truth to the world than to admit it to yourself, and I faced this one in late 2003. I was going to Pakistan, and bought a guidebook in the Footprint series, written by Dave Winter and Ivan Mannheim. I was enjoying the book until I came across the following sentence: "The albedo of Gilgit's brown, barren hills is high, and the heat from the sun just seems to bounce around the bowl that the town sits in."
"So now that he's dead, you're going to watch his films?" said Dan in the video shop.
"Is that wrong?" I said.
"I suppose not," he said. He pushed a stack of Ingmar Bergman DVDs across the countertop. They had a whole shelf of them. The boss of the shop is Swedish, although in fairness to him, they have a whole shelf of Fellini and Kurosawa, too.
There is a danger, in the arena of big-picture geopolitical reporting, of what might be called double-hyping. This occurs when two apparently opposing sides – the investigator and the investigated, the liberal and the conservative, the capitalist and the Communist – actually have an interest in exaggerating the same line in a story. Most famously, this occurred during the Cold War, when the Pentagon and the Kremlin shared an interest in exaggerating the capabilities of the Red Army...
Mikhail Bulgakov’s Heart of a Dog
It is possible that Bulgakov not only knew there was a police informer in the audience, but may have been able to see who it was. The spy's report, filed a few days later to the Soviet secret police department of the era, OGPU, contains such an accurate transcription of parts of A Dog's Heart that he must have been scribbling notes at high speed, and the pompousness of his denunciation suggests that he would have been conspicuous by his straight face...
Lawrence Wright’s ‘The Looming Tower’
Eventually, one of O’Neill’s most important FBI partners, Ali Soufan, one of the few US intelligence agents who spoke Arabic, was shown the photographs. It was 12 September 2001, and he knew O’Neill was dead. When it dawned on him that the CIA had known for more than eighteen months that two of the hijackers were in the US, he retched from the horror of it...
Declaring the Russian government guilty in Strasbourg offers western Europe both the chance of success and the chance of shame. If west European governments push Russia to accept the verdicts of the European Court and reform its brutal security forces, its noxious jails and corrupt local authorities, it proves there is a European way of changing undemocratic governments - a way that involves neither turning a blind eye to government-sanctioned torture and murder, nor treating an offending country as a pariah-state-cum-bombing-range. But if Russia fails to respond to Strasbourg, and western European governments take no action, the idea of "European values" looks as sullied in the grime of Chechnya as America's claim to moral leadership after Guantánamo and Abu Ghraib...
Officially, the Kazakh government has been waging a campaign of denunciation against Baron Cohen's creation, but in the seat in front of me, I noticed that Dariga Nazarbayeva, the powerful daughter of the president of Kazakhstan and the organiser of the conference, was laughing...
It would be only a year before anything resembling socialism in power vanished from Westminster. Yet to the guests gathered for the farewell garden party at 12 Kensington Palace Gardens, London, one day in 1978, such an outcome must have seemed unlikely. The aristocratic residents, the Cholmondeley family, hereditary Lord Great Chamberlains, were selling up and moving out after six decades. The future seemed to belong to the trade unions, to the Soviets - who had begun acquiring diplomatic premises in the street in the 1930s - to the Arabs and Iranians, squelching with money after the 1973 surge in oil prices, and to a horde of spotty, uppity, lefty graduates contemplating the staid notion of a mortgage in the dingy enclaves of Notting Hill, Camden and Islington...
If you expect your Nokia to know what you're on about when you message your partner, "That shop in Bolton has the grout we need," it will begin grumpily demanding, "Spell?" If, however, you want to say: "Who's your favourite dictator, Stalin, Hitler, Franco or Napoleon?" the mobile understands exactly what you mean. My phone goes all talk-to-the-hand if I try to message somebody to remember to get the emulsion, and that Sainsbury's has guavas. But write: "Marxist dogma relies too heavily on the dialectical approach," and the Nokia begins, figuratively speaking, to nod in agreement...
Kamboja Street is so close to the sea that the tsunami all but levelled it a year ago. Most of the fishermen's villas, with their red-tiled roofs, fluted columns and verandahs, were shaved off the earth by the great cutthroat razor of water which stood over them, then sliced them from their foundations...
Now that the US, like Britain, has an all-volunteer military - in Vietnam, most of the troops were conscripts - your average marine is much more likely to be the kind of guy who is in uniform because he yearns to feel what it is like to be afraid of violent injury, and what it is like to frighten others. When I asked a 19-year-old marine in Iraq last year why he'd joined up, he said: "I've always been into explosions and, you know, just, just, uh, action movies."
At the Maureen Paley stand, a woman with an Italian accent is gesturing to Wolfgang Tillmans' enormous colour print, Einzelgänger V. "I love this burgundy one," she says to the gallery rep. "If you had something like that, but smaller?"
At first glance, the arrival of the Spazz on our shores looks like the latest in a long line of international brand pratfalls. The Mitsubishi Pajero 4X4, which translated as Mitsubishi Wanker in Spanish; the British curry sauce range that came out, in Punjabi, as Sharwood's Arse; the Toyota MR2, which sounded rather like the Toyota Merde to the French; or the original transliteration of Coca-Cola into Chinese, which caused many possible readings, one of which was "bite the wax tadpole"...
Mortazavi returned to see an Iran that had changed again. "It's a brand new country from when I left," he said. "You see colour everywhere. During the war it was all grey. Now there's colour. The women are beautiful. Eight years ago, plastic surgery was still a luxury. Now everybody's having their nose done." In north Tehran, you often hear that word, "everybody". Meaning, it is understood, not "everybody in Iran" but "everybody I know in Tehran with money"...
Christian Wolmar’s ‘The Subterranean Railway’
On Easter day, I walked down Farringdon Road from Rosebery Avenue, towards Farringdon Station. I intended to make a voyage to one of the planet’s more mysterious realms, the point at which Zone Six of the London Underground’s fare map gives way to Zone A, the point that, for many Londoners, marks the edge of the known world. Unless you happen to live there, of course. But I suspect there are more Londoners alive now who have been to Lombok than have taken the Tube to Chalfont & Latimer or Chorleywood out of curiosity...
A second vehicle drew up alongside him, a cargo van. Gardner found himself looking up into the side doorway of the van where three militants crouched, looking at him. One of them was pointing a pistol.
"I pleaded with them in Arabic not to shoot me," says Gardner. "They had a very quick discussion among themselves. I couldn't pick up what they were saying. Then they emptied the pistol into me at pretty much point-blank range." Four 9mm bullets smashed into Gardner's spinal nerves, pelvis and abdomen.
Curated by Fire: the Momart Inferno
A Day in London, A Knight in Aden
Fiona Hill and Clifford Gaddy’s ‘The Siberian Curse’
A country far away, of which we know little: 12 November 2001
