Cross-Referencing Coetzee

[Henry]

Bowles is one of my fave authors, particularly his short stories, but except
for his highly measured voice, I don't see Bowles in Coetzee.  Kafka, natch.
Beckett?

http://www.conversationalreading.com/2008/10/coetzee-and-cro.html 
Coetzee and Crossreferencing
Matthew Cheney:

And then I realized that I was marking up my teaching copy of Michael K. as
if I were marking up a poem.  I looked, then, at my teaching copy of
Disgrace, from when I used it in a class a few years ago. The same thing.
Lots of circled words, lots of "cf."s referring me to words and phrases in
other parts of the book. Lots of sounds building on sounds, rhythms on
rhythms in a way that isn't particularly meaningful in itself, but that
contributes to an overall tone-structure, a scaffold of utterance to hold up
the shifting meanings of the story and characters.

The other writers I think of as doing this sort of thing -- Gaddis, DeLillo,
and Pynchon come to mind, though more as 2nd-cousins than twin brothers --
do so on a larger, more baroque scale.  Coetzee is closer to Beckett, but
more concrete (less dense than early Beckett, less ethereal than later). The
biggest influences on Coetzee, it seems from some of his interviews and
essays, have been Kafka and Beckett, and if forced to say which writers of
the last 100 years matter the most to me right now, I'd say, myself, Kafka
and Beckett, with Coetzee somewhere close behind them, hand-in-hand with
Paul Bowles, Virginia Woolf, and maybe a couple of others, depending on my
mood.

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