Fugue for a Writer in Winter

...Perhaps his last three novels don’t form a trilogy at all, but are the beginning of something larger...

...Elizabeth Costello certainly had her foibles—including several lumbering attempts to enter the afterlife—and Coetzee’s fictive self is no exception...

...The project, called Strong Opinions, is a series of essays about the political topics of the day, commissioned by a German publisher...

...In the process, Coetzee has brought off a novel in which philosophical meditation, structural inventiveness, realism and fantasy, and living characters blend effortlessly together...

...The easily identifiable crimes of Vice President Dick Cheney and company that mainly fuel Señor C’s anger and opposition are important emotions, particularly in these appalling times, but not the full and balanced meal every writer requires...

...Over the ensuing weeks, as he learns more about Señor C through Anya, Alan pegs him as an easy mark and comes up with his own scheme...

...In Slow Man (2005), Costello’s unlikely and sudden appearance in the middle of the novel, as its apparent author, serves to nudge and cajole Paul Rayment, the dithering protagonist, to take some personal (and therefore narrative) risks...

...And so the reader comes to understand that in Diary of a Bad Year Coetzee has combined the shifting architecture of Bachian counterpoint with the moral intensity of Dostoyevsky, though it is an intensity that takes residence in forgiveness, redemption and the quiet particularities of the human condition...

...In the second Señor C offers a paean to Tolstoy and (primarily) Dostoyevsky: “They annihilate one’s impurer pretensions...

...In the laundry room of the apartment complex, he comes upon a beautiful young woman ironing as the rest of her clothes circle in the washing machine...

...they fortify one’s arm...

...In these essays, after all, Señor C has found new territory in his own voice from behind that previous wall of anger...

...they clear one’s eyesight...

...For Diary of a Bad Year, Coetzee has fashioned a fuguelike configuration...

...Nicknamed Señor C because a neighbor has mistakenly identified him as an immigrant to Australia from South America, not South Africa, he lives alone and lonely in a Sydney apartment complex dubbed the Towers, chafing under his body’s diminishing physical capabilities...

...Clearly past patience with following anything close to a standardized approach to fiction, in his recent efforts Coetzee plays more openly with the possibilities of the novel, mixing up its constituent parts...

...At the same time, she is able to see past his watereddown lecherous intentions and offer Señor C some needed literary criticism, convincing him to reconsider his political brimstone and instead attempt essays of a softer, more personal nature...

...Anya is already comfortable in a relationship with an investment consultant named Alan, who in many ways is the embodiment of much of what Señor C rails about in his political essays...

...No longer reigniting Señor C’s sexual desire, just its memory, Anya’s extraordinary beauty gives way to the complexity of her more ordinary but specific self...

...Coetzee’s new novel arrives in an unusual yet familiar package...

...Meanwhile, Señor C and Anya are slowly adopting postures of distant admiration for each other...

...With Diary of a Bad Year, Coetzee has decided to slip off the mask of Costello and offer a version of himself as the main character, a writer who shares some but not all of Coetzee’s life details...

...Señor C’s moral outrage at the dishonor America has wrought on itself and the world stands in counterpoint to his pathetically transparent longing for a woman who could easily be his granddaughter...

...By the end of the novel Anya’s voice comes to dominate the page—the second and third narrative thread belong to her, in a long letter she has written to Señor C that he reads without comment, and her own musings on the bottom of the page about what she might do when Señor C eventually passes away...

...Since Elizabeth Costello (2003), the Nobel laureate has focused on characters who are writers, allowing the creator behind the curtain more than a few steps onto the center of his fictions’ stage...

...In the first, he considers Bach his “spiritual father,” as if he is aware of the structure of the novel Coetzee has fashioned for him...

...After her initial misgivings, Anya (whose perspective takes up the bottom third of every page) seems perfectly willing to be the old man’s eye candy as he overlooks her indifferent typing skills...

...So who, the reader wonders, is using whom...

...He offers her a job, at twice the usual salary, to type into manuscript form the tapes he has been recording from his unreadable handwriting...

...Thus he presents a fictive alternate Coetzee, so he can use himself as he once used the vehicle of Elizabeth Costello...

...Señor C is especially moved by Ivan Karamazov’s angry denunciation of forgiveness, not because of Ivan’s argument, but because of the throb of Ivan’s vibrant human voice...

...How easy it would be to electronically slip into Señor C’s computer, take control of his funds, and secretly reap the interest on a $3 million estate...

...Coetzee certainly appears to be on a hunt in the deepest literary waters, and it is doubtful that he is about to give up the chase...

...In the following days, with a careful question here and there, he discovers where this 20-something Filipina named Anya lives in the Towers, as well as the details of her daily routine...

...Virtually no words pass between them, but Señor C is smitten by her “delicious behind...

...fiction thrives on multiplicity, ambiguity, unpredictability...

...Unfortunately, Señor C’s strong opinions (the top third of each page) are too sure of their rightness to serve as a seductive text for a young woman...

...All the while he schemes (in the middle narrative thread of each page) to come up with a plan that will allow him to spend more time with her...

...In doing so he has entered the territory of Vladimir Nabokov and Julio Cortázar (and of brilliant younger writers like Salvador Plascencia and Mark Z. Danielewski), where the structure is as particular as a fingerprint...

...Every page is divided initially into two sections of text, then three, and each section moves forward its own narrative, which, together with the others it shares on the page, mirrors the complexities and possibilities of musical counterpoint...

...Alan is all for the crushing mechanics of the new economic order...

...Coetzee’s recent novels also take an increasingly stark and rueful look at the challenges of aging, where physical failing is not necessarily compensated by increased wisdom...

...In that book the eponymous protagonist was an Australian writer who delivered and authored literary addresses and essays that Coetzee had in fact delivered and published...

...One might say the three works form a trilogy about the ironies of literary creation, but they are also linked by Coetzee’s recent search for a novel of unusual shape and substance...

...Still, Señor C manages to have the novel’s last word—in his truncated space at the top of the final pages— through two of his softer essays...