Stranger Shores: Literary Essays, 1986-1999 Book

To write a review about Strangers Shores - essays feels a bit like a Droste: most of the essays are so close to reviews that it's hard to distinguish between the two. That's not implying that Coetzee doesn't reach a certain depth like one expects in essays, but he does remain superficial now and then, notating not much more than what's in the reviewed books and ending with a summing up of some of it's faults. If I would condense his criticism to stars I'd say he gives most three stars.

Another thing that I noticed is the order of the essays. Though his interests range from
Tolstoy to the South African rugby championship of 1995, most of the less intellectual subjects come at the end of the book. There seems to be a need to rank Coetzee as a serious intellectual with a casual interest in more plain themes. Strangely the more popular subjects lend them very good for his way of analyzing. He has a smart eye and wide range of interests to write about someone like William Gass, but there's always the competition with another great writer that you can read in his words. Being the great writer Coetzee is more interesting to see analyzing the lesser, like Daphne Rook - of whom I'd never heard - or Thomas Pringle. It seems also that the more local his subjects become - like Noël Mosterts book on the history of the Eastern Cape Frontier - the further back they are in the collection. This is clearly with an international audience in mind, but those essays captivate me more since I hardly know anything about them.

It's off course nice to read essays from his point of view about big Dutch writers like Nooteboom, Mulisch and Emants, but I have the feeling they don't hold up very well. Mulisch was the only one I got more interested in by reading Coetzee. It seems our writers have a very regional appeal and limited reach compared to other international writers Coetzee talks about. Or is it just that he sounds so authorative and is one of the few who English speakers who can read Dutch that I am impressed more than I need to be? We do need more critics from abroad judging Dutch books, that's clear. There is something to win by joining the larger languages like English.