J.M. Coetzee - Wikipedia entry

[Richard Ryan]

The Wikipedia entry for John Maxwell Coetzee (it was created in 2003 - checking the entry's editorial history reveals that a number of different volunteer editors have worked on it over the years). 

Pynchon devotees may notice several points of biographical similarities between the Nobel Laureate and the object of their more regular literary attentions.  One is the two authors' shared backgrounds in both the Humanities and technical studies (Coetzee received Bachelors degrees with honors in both English and Mathematics, his doctoral dissertation was a computerized analysis of Beckett's fiction, and he worked for IBM in London as a programmer early in his professional life.) A second resonance is their mutual inclination to reclusivity.

For the purposes of our group reading, one detail from Coetzee's life in particular stands out:

"He married in 1963 and divorced in 1980. He had a daughter and a son from the marriage, but his son was killed at the age of 23 in an accident, an event Coetzee confronts in his 1994 novel The Master of Petersburg."


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J.M._Coetzee

"John Maxwell Coetzee (IPA: /kʊtˈsiː ə/ or Afrikaans IPA: [kutˈsiˑe]) (born 9 February 1940) is an author and academic from South Africa (now an Australian citizen living in South Australia). A novelist and literary critic as well as a translator, Coetzee won the 2003 Nobel Prize in Literature...."