J.M. Coetzee's Diary of a Bad Year

J.M. Coetzee's new novel came out in June of last year, was reviewed about two issues ago in the New York Review of Books, and fell into my grubby hands a little after winter break. I've never been a big Coetzee fan, but after reading this book I think I'll withhold judgment until I can dig a little deeper into his corpus. "Diary of a Bad Year" is an intellectually stimulating and moving work of fiction.

The novel follows a senescent writer, known variously as Senor C or Juan, as he compiles a collection of short diatribes on culture, politics, and philosophy for a book called "Strong Opinions". He meets a gorgeous young woman named Anya who lives above him in in his Sydney apartment building and offers her a job as his typist. Her husband Alan, motivated by a mixture of avarice and jealousy, conspires to defraud Senor C of his money.

This is the bare outline of the plot. Yet the novel tells this simple story in an unconventional way. Not content with showing us a few isolated snippets of Senor C's opinions, nor to present only one perspective at a time, Coetzee divides the page into three separate rows of text, each narrating a distinct strand of the story from different viewpoints. At the top are the opinions themselves, written in the old scribe's elegant, formal locution. In the center, the writer narrates his own real-time experiences. And, after a time, a third row appears, narrated from the perspective of Anya.

The novel begins with C's opinion on the state; underneath, in spare strokes, C tells of his first encounter with Anya:

My first glimpse of her was in the laundry room. It was a mid-morning on a quiet spring day and I was sitting, watching the washing go around, when this quite startling young woman walked in. Startling because the last thing I was expecting was such an apparition; also because the tomato-red shift she wore was so startling in its brevity.

Next page, the discourse on the state continues. Underneath:

The spectacle of me may have given her a start too: a crumpled old fellow in a corner who at first glance might have been a tramp off the street.

So far, so "Grumpy Old Men 3". The sense of creepy old man lust only intensifies when C describes Anya's ass as "so near to perfect as to be angelic." What are we to make of C's claim that Anya's beauty elicits in him a "metaphysical" or "post-physical" ache? Is this just an academic gloss on a pretty mundane sexual urge?

Coetzee delights in dashing our expectations. Instead of having Anya be unaware of Senor C's lasciviousness, she actually goads him on. Instead of giving us Anya only through C's idealizing eyes, she is given her own autonomous voice and reveals herself to be an intelligent, sensitive, and sympathetic character.

Senor C's (this is the name Anya gives him, mistaking his South African for South American origins) strong opinions range from insightful to glib, but the arguments themselves, at least for most of the book, are not of prime importance. What's being explored here is the connection between the mind and the body, the private and the public. C's opinions reveal a vibrant intellect; his life is shabby and his body decrepit. What happens between the two selves?

Conventions of discourse require that the writer's existential situation, which like everyone else's is a perilous one, and at every moment too, be bracketed off from what he writes. But why should we always bow to convention?

Anya's boyfriend turns out to be of some interest, as well. He opines on many of Senor C's arguments, roundly criticizing them and revealing himself to be a philosophical materialist and political realist; thus a counterweight to C's philosophical idealism and political liberalism. When Anya takes him to C's place and he begins to criticize C on having a naive conception of human nature and having only accomplished anything in the realm of the fanciful, we expect an epic battle between the two philosophical viewpoints. Yet again, Coetzee doesn't deliver on the expected; Senor C says not a word in response.

Ultimately, accepting the uncertainess of his "strong opinions" in the face of his "existential situation" is C's greatest challenge. Here the warmth of human contact serves where the intellect falls down, and Anya becomes his soft, soothing escort to the other world. "Diary of a Bad Year" may not be perfect. It wasn't totally necessary to show every one of C's strong opinions and thus break up the narrative to such a degree. Still, it's a touching and intriguing novel, full of dark humor and insight.