Inner Workings: Literary Essays 2000-2005

INNER WORKINGS is a collection of 21 essays by J.M. Coetzee, 16 of which first appeared (in an earlier form) in the "New York Review of Books." With the sole exception of Walt Whitman, all of the subjects are authors of the 20th century (several are still alive and productive, though years from now they surely will be thought of as 20th-century writers). For the most part the essays follow the format common to the "New York Review of Books": some biographical information about the author; relatively brief discussion of his (or, in the case of Nadine Gordimer, her) place or significance in 20th-century literature; more detailed discussion of one or more works of the author; and, where applicable, some mention of the merits of the translation into English. I was prompted to buy the book when, picking it up in the bookstore last week and skimming its table of contents, I saw that a number of the essays deal with authors I have been reading in the past two or three years -- specifically, the ones listed in the title to this review. I have now read the essays on those authors, as well as ones on Italo Svevo, Robert Musil, and Graham Greene. If and when I have time to read (or re-read) several other authors covered in the book (e.g., Samuel Beckett, Saul Bellow, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and Philip Roth), I will make a point of going back and reading what Coetzee has to say about them. The essays are intelligent and informative, well-written and easily comprehensible. There is no in-depth analysis or exegesis, but neither are the essays superficial. Only in some of the essays does Coetzee express strong critical judgments. A few of those are negative. (For instance, he concludes that Sandor Marai's novelistic achievements are "slight.") I don't think INNER WORKINGS constitutes literary criticism or analysis of the first order, but that's alright by me. In each essay I read there was enough new information or fresh perspectives on the author and work(s) at issue to make my reading the essay worth my time. I will end by quoting two sentences from Coetzee's essay on W.G. Sebald: "Sebald did not call himself a novelist -- prose writer was the term he preferred -- but his enterprise nevertheless depends for its success on attaining lift-off from the biographical or the essayistic -- the prosaic in the everyday sense of the word -- into the realm of the imaginative. The mysterious ease with which he is able to achieve such lift-off is the clearest proof of his genius."

Coetzee, whose background is Dutch, lives in Australia. He is known, of course, as a South African, but his roots belong to Europe. He has an affinity for the hard, dense German authors and writes about them well. As in his other collected essays, he likes to talk about translators and their work. Clearly, he has the expertise to do so. His close readings of Celan's poetry and of Kafka's prose give one an insight into his mental processes, which are exacting. Unlike Sontag, for example, one doesn't always come away excited to read further; instead one feels duty-bound to do so. I especially appreciated his essay on Arthur Miller's "The Misfits," which is an often ignored masterpiece of John Huston. He offers appraisals of Robert Walser, Robert Musil, Walter Benjamin, and other modern masters of the German-speaking world. These, too, are Sontag's favorites. On Americans such as Saul Bellow and Philip Roth, he covers familiar territory, but seems to have no feeling for their humor. He faults Bellow for not doing more with philosophy, which may be fair, but doesn't touch sufficiently on the development of his comic genius. In my view, Sontag writes a better essay, while Coetzee writes far superior fiction.

This bundle of essays contains superb reviews of important authors and (part of) their work. Hereafter, a brief summary of Coetzee's comments and evaluations, with a few remarks. Italo Svevo considered himself as a peer, a fellow researcher of Freud into the grip of the unconscious on conscious life. Robert Musil (Young Törless) was skeptical of the power of reason to guide human conduct. Robert Walzer (Jakob von Gunten) considered himself as a `Man von Unten' (an underdog). Bruno Schulz's book `Cinnamon Shops' is a recreation of childhood consciousnesses, full of terror, obsessions and crazy glories. Joseph Roth's `The Radetzky March' is a great poem of elegy to Habsburg Austria. Sándor Márai considered himself as a dupe of history. He behaved like a caricature of the bourgeois intellectual, scorning the rabble of the right and the left. Günter Grass's `Crabwalk' should be considered a breakthrough, as war crimes against Germans during WW II are not taboo anymore. Graham Greene's `Brighton Rock' is a confrontation between religious Good and Evil and materialist right and wrong. For Saul Bellow, literature is an interpretation of the chaos of life. Philip Roth's `The Plot against America' paints a vision of a world based on hatred and suspicion, a world of them and us. Nadine Gordimer's `The Pickup' is a dismissal of the false gods of the West, the gods of market capital. Gabriel García Márquez's so-called magic realism is simply a matter of telling hard-to-believe stories. For V.S. Naipaul, self-denial is the road of weakness. J.M. Coetzee pierces the veil of Walt Whitman's amativeness. Whitman's democracy is a civic religion energized by a broadly erotic feeling. J.M. Coetzee gives brilliant comments on translation problems for hermetic poetry (Paul Celan). Hermetic poetry seems to be mostly, as it is here, more puzzle work than poetry. I only disagree with the author's review of Samuel Beckett's work. Here I side with another Nobel Prize winner, Naguib Mahfuz (Adrift on the Nile). This book is a must read for all lovers of world literature. Of course, one should read most of the books reviewed in these essays.