Diary of a Bad Year

1. The novel is made possible by divisions. Coetzee divided the book into two sections called "Strong Opinions" and "Second Diary" in order to differentiate issues extrinsic and intrinsic to the self, only to reveal that they're actually both driven by external events on the one hand, and limitations of intellectual and affective visions on the other. Additionally Coetzee divided each page into essays supposedly written by Señor C, an aging Australian writer born in South Africa, who wrote a novel called Waiting for the Barbarians, not unlike Coetzee himself; his narration of encounters with and thoughts of Anya, a Filipina who never lived in the Philippines whom he invited to work as his typist; and Anya's observations of Señor C's writings, and of his actions and reactions towards her.

2. An excerpt from Señor C's essay, "On terrorism,": "... a secret is an item of information and as such falls under the wing of information science, one of whose branches is mining, the extraction of scintillae of information (secrets) from tons of data. The masters of information have forgotten about poetry, where words may have a meaning quite different from what the lexicon says, where the metaphoric spark is always one jump ahead of the decoding function, where another, unforeseen reading is always possible." He liked to call his brand of political thought "pessimistic anarchistic quietism, or anarchist quietistic pessimism, or pessimistic quietistic anarchism," even if he doubted his own qualification as a thinker.

3. Anya recognizes herself, and knows that she's most probably viewed, as "racy, exciting, exotic" yet "just the little Filipina"--but with a tinge of irony, which is the only probable tone Coetzee could have given her, if he would like to survive in our age of political correctness. She even teased, that is return the gaze to, the old man when he asked her where she was born: "Why do you want to know? Am I not blonde-eyed and blue-haired enough for your tastes?" Señor C was speechless, but in another occasion, upon seeing Anya's clothes "enough to outfit a middle-sized cathouse," he asked if she had "a shoe collection too." Filipinas are remembered for how little they are, and how extravagant. But Anya remembered her mother as someone very loyal to her Australian father, and mused: "That is how we are, we Filipinas. Good wives, good mistresses, good friends too. Everything good."

4. Movies, aside from literary works, are among Señor C's immediate intertexts in his essays, like Kurasawa's Seven Samurai and Kubrick's film adaption of Lolita. His was a commissioned series of essays because he admitted to no longer have the endurance needed for writing novels. He told Anya that, "To write a novel you have to be like Atlas, holding up a whole world on your shoulders and supporting it there for months and years while its affairs work themselves out."

Anya was eager to tell the old man, however, that his essays, especially the one about the terrorists, were a bit "idealistic" and "unrealistic," and then shared her own uncle's encounters with the Islamists in Mindanao, who don't mind dying if it could bring nearer "the day of the battle to end all battles, when the infidels are defeated and Islam takes over the world." She was so opinionated, a "little Filipina typist who thinks she knows everything," that Señor C wondered if Anya was the real mother of the thoughts he was putting down on paper. But, really, where does authorship begin and end?

~ After J. M. Coetzee's Diary of a Bad Year (2007)

The History of Love

1. The tragedy of lost opportunities is what makes most stories sad; but being unaware of this tragedy is what makes them effectively poignant. And poignant was the life of Leopold Gursky, who unknowingly was robbed authorship of a novel called The History of Love; he entrusted it to a friend and was betrayed without him ever knowing. Further he was estranged from his own son who grew up to be a famous writer and died searching for his father--something our old guy was also not fully allowed by the fates to know.

Needless to say, Gursky grew old living alone, and prepared himself to die alone. In his wallet was an index card that says: MY NAME IS LEO GURSKY I HAVE NO FAMILY PLEASE CALL PINELAWN CEMETERY I HAVE A PLOT THERE IN THE JEWISH PART THANK YOU FOR YOUR CONSIDERATION. The thing is that, "He learned to live with the truth. Not to accept it, but to live with it. It was like living with an elephant. His room was tiny, and every morning he had to squeeze around the truth just to get to the bathroom. To reach the armoire to get a pair of underpants he had to crawl under the truth, praying it wouldn't choose that moment to sit on his face. At night, when he closed his eyes, he felt it looming above him."

2. Krauss balanced the heavy drama in Gursky's life with the charming innocence with which fourteen-year-old Alma Singer, named after the beloved in Gursky's novel, tried to search for the author of the novel that his father gave her mother as a gift. The excerpted chapters ("The Age of Glass," "The Birth of Feeling," "The Age of String") from Gurksky's novel are equally delightful, almost poetic, reminiscent of Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities in their mythic texture.

3. Of course Leo loved to read, as did Alma. He devoured Anna Karenina, Ulysses, the works. Meanwhile, the young girl's hero was Antoine de Saint-Exupery (whose The Little Prince was read to her by her father when she was six). Leo's son, who pretended to be his own character in able to search clues for the whereabouts of his father, wrote to Alma's mother: "You also asked what I do. I read. This morning I finished The Street of Crocodiles for the third time. I found it almost unbearably beautiful." One time, Alma caught her mother reading Cervantes, "the most famous Spanish writer," her mother claimed. These are people whose lives are somewhat occupied by literary works, lives in which literature still has some power.

4. A little mention of the Philippines, through Alma: "Henry Lavender... told us about his collection of seashells, many of which he'd dove for himself on trips to the Philippines." I would not even go to issues of legality; it was fiction, obviously, and worse crimes happen everyday. But moments like this, no matter how brief, or precisely because they were brief, reveal so much of how a nation is commonly condensedly perceived from the outside. This one: apparently driven by a vision of the country as of tourists, some place to go to when you need to collect things.

~ After Nicole Krauss's The History of Love (2005)

The Baron in the Trees

1. This is Calvino's story of a boy who decided not to walk this earth, quite literally, but to live on trees instead--as narrated by his younger brother, who realized early on that he would live a rather contrary, normal life.

2. The younger boy is Biagio: the writer, who had a weakness toward stasis, and consequently became the preserver of text. The older boy Cosimo who would grow up as the baron was the singer of tales, and "was swept by that mania of the storyteller, who never knows which stories are more beautiful; the ones that really happened and the evocation of which recalls a whole flow of hours past, of petty emotions, boredom, happiness, insecurity, vanity, and self-disgust, or those which are invented, and in which he cuts out a main pattern, and everything seems easy, then begins to vary it as he realizes more and more that he is describing again things that had happened or been understood in lived reality." Cosimo's seeming abandon caused Biagio much deliberation in his written versions: how valid would be his disbelief when those things did not actually happen to him?

3. Cosimo's friendship with the brigand Gian dei Brughi in Chapter 12 is a story that could stand by itself. They shared the love of reading--as with many other novel heroes before them--and exchanged books, mostly novels. Gian dei Brughi lost interest with banditry altogether, something that worried his younger apprentices, who threatened to set dei Brughi's copy of Richardson's Clarissa on fire if the reluctant bandit would not go back to his old ways. Because he no longer had his heart in thievery, dei Brughi was caught and put on trial. Before his execution, the only thing he wanted was to know how Jonathan Wild's story ended in a novel by Fielding's. In the end: the need for closure, even if it was only imagined; or: the only closure we're guaranteed in this life is a fiction.

~ After Italo Calvino's The Baron in the Trees (1957)