NP but the ever-interesting Coetzee: The South According to Coetzee | Public Books

[John Bailey]

Thanks Mark, this is fascinating.
TL;DR for everyone else: the third in JM Coetzee's current trilogy is
being published in Spanish before English. The article argues well
that this might be related to "his growing disenchantment with the
global hegemony of American and British culture." He's been
increasingly active in trying to promote voices from the South - not
as a 'global South' but recognising the distinct experiences of people
equatorially obverse from most of the canon.
'For Coetzee, there is a “mythic South” produced by the writers and
thinkers of the North, and a “real South,” a South of shared physical
experiences and long, complex histories of colonization, where “the
winds blow in a certain way and the leaves fall in a certain way and
the sun beats down in a certain way that is instantly recognisable
from one part of the South to another.”'
Pynchon's southern forays have always been particularly jarring for me
- naming a South African slave Austra is one of his more tin-eared
manouevres.
At the same time, I don't think we whiteys from the south are exactly
the most silenced people in the world today.

On Tue, Oct 8, 2019 at 7:22 PM Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com> wrote:
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