NP; for Coetzee-interested digression-minded: Summertime

[Mark Kohut]

I have speculated here that J. M. Coetzee
and Thomas Pynchon are pen pals, at least.  This could
be entirely projection, as it is based on little:

Fact: We did learn that Coetzee supervised a PhD Thesis
in the late 70s on Pynchon. 

There are some themes and, especially, a trope or two they have
in common. Slaughterhouse as metaphor ( but so do many others' see it, I'm sure; in fact maybe to Tolstoy, at least). 

The meaning of violence in an unjust world. 

What we've lost in our common humanity, or lack of it. (Maybe)

Anyway, I have had a chance to read Coetzee's newest before its December pub in the U.S. Of course it is worth reading---you gonna believe the Nobel Committee or my lying judgments?!....

Briefly. The novel's conceit is that a biographer has interviewed a few people close to the late novelist J. M. Coetzee during the time he found his vision in the early 70s. Perfection of the life or of the work, as Yeats said an artist must choose, might sum up the overarching theme, or is the man, the work?  but as we explore IV on one level as a book echoing TRP's vision from earlier books, especially GR, the book he was writing when IV is set, I could not help but feel some kind of crosswind. Prolly more projecting---I want them to be "friends", how's that for objectivity!

Just FYI. Unlike IV, The book is absolutely humorless---a self-critical judgment attributed to Coetzee in the book--- it is as earnestly serious as Calvinism abandoned, but for the whole mindset of it.