J.M. Coetzee

In *Age of Iron* (among the reviews), the mother abandoned by her daughter and condemned to solitude cries out in despair, “let me go to myself, (...) it is a hard task, but I am learning.” In *Disgrace* (also among the reviews), the protagonist, a pompous intellectual, moves toward death: > lying on a plastic chair amid the stench of chicken feathers and rotting apples, he feels his interest in

The novel is set in South Africa in the mid-1980s, during the era of apartheid. An elderly classics teacher learns that she has incurable cancer. She resolves to recount the final days of her life to her daughter, who left the country many years ago: > I tell you the story not so that you may take pity on me, but so that you may learn how things are. It would be easier, I know, if the story c

A literature professor is expelled from the university following a relationship—essentially sexual—with a female student. The man is over fifty and twice divorced. Accustomed to being courted by women, he now finds himself alone, reduced to seeking sex with prostitutes, and thus lets himself be drawn into the affair, in pursuit of his own vanity and his own eros. He moves to the countryside to