This is an edition of Book Roundup, our editors’ weekly guide to the best books. Register here.
In a recent incident, novelist Marlon James was asked to name a book by another author that he wished he had written. He chose DogeatersJessica Hagedorn’s 1990 novel about the Philippines. Although it was set in Manila during the reign of Ferdinand Marcos, James couldn’t help but think of Jamaica, the country he grew up in, while reading it. “I thought: Him he knows Kingston,” he said. What he meant was that his book helped him better see the beauty, excitement, and chaos of Jamaica’s capital, which would become the setting for his Booker prize-winning novel. A Brief History of the Seven Murders. Gary Shteyngart made a similar discovery about the drift of literary inspiration when he traveled to Cape Town, South Africafor Atlanticlooking for a follow-up to Nobel Prize-winning author JM Coetzee. He was looking for clues to decipher the novel as the author’s proverbs in the houses Coetzee had lived in and the streets he had walked—but Shteyngart learned more from discovering what the author chose to leave out.
First, here are five stories from AtlanticBook Section:
Shteyngart’s article is the latest Atlanticthe “Writer’s Trail” series, in which journalists and novelists follow the paths of beloved authors in the places that shaped their careers. While the previous essays in this series focused on novels that vividly evoke their setting, Shteyngart’s work was different, because of Coetzee’s description of the city in which he grew up. The author, whose novels dealt with South Africa’s transition from brutal apartheid to reconciliation, deliberately blurred the details of neighborhoods, people, and even the one characteristic that determined roles and rights in apartheid-era South Africa: race. Readers are often left to guess what faction a certain character belongs to, what era the story is set in, or what factions are fighting over its mythical or apocalyptic backdrop. One scholar told Shteyngart that Coetzee’s views were filtered through “a ripple in the glass,” obscuring details that tend to underpin realist novels.
Coetzee, who moved to Australia in 2002, a year before becoming South Africa’s second Nobel laureate, has also written about other places—and also shown them through waves in a mirror. What unites all the novels is that, although they are written by a European, a South African who opposed apartheid, they are about how people treat each other everywhere. My favorite example is among his mystery books. Waiting for the Barbarianspublished in 1980, it is often read as a critique of colonialism and, in particular, of its apartheid-era homeland. But the work has no clues as to its order; we only know that the magistrate who tells the story presides over a colonial outpost hundreds of miles from the center of the empire. We could be on the far outskirts of sprawling Rome or deep in Russian-populated Mongolia. Any reader of history can name a dozen regimes that contained reminders of Coetzee’s human strengths: corruption, brutality, meanness, greed, and the occasional act of moral heroism.
The protagonist becomes desperate when the royal soldiers, fearing an imminent invasion of their castle, begin to plan an attack against the local “barbarians”. When reinforcements arrive from the capital, to establish a brutal new order and subjugate the inhabitants, a great irony emerges: The imperial special forces are more brutal than any enemy seen in the book. When the narrator opposes the new colonel and becomes another victim of the government, parallels to South Africa’s long struggle for equality and justice become clear. But what makes this novel great—and what makes Coetzee a brilliant novelist—is that it is not bound to any one place. It’s about what humans do to each other, throughout history and around the world, and what it means to hope that this state of being can change one day.
The City Where Coetzee Is God
By Gary Shteyngart
Looking for the Nobel Prize winner in Cape Town, the city he left behind
What to Read
Clutchby Emily Nemens
The five women at the center of Nemens’ second novel—Carson, Gregg, Hillary, Bella, and Reba—have turned 40. In the months after a celebratory weekend getaway to Palm Springs, middle age hits hard; each friend sees their life start to fall apart or finally come together. Each comes from a different background: Carson is a writer living in Brooklyn finishing his second personal novel, Gregg is a feminist politician in Austin, Hillary is a doctor in Chicago whose husband is struggling with addiction, Bella is a criminal living in Manhattan in an ongoing marriage, and Reba has recently left the corporate world and is struggling with infertility. But the questions they ask each other about a range of relationships, parenting experiences, and the struggles of having a career feel universal. Like Mary McCarthy’s GroupRona Jaffe’s The Best of Everythingand even higher level Sex and the City episodes, this story casts a sharp, sociological eye on the ambitious experiences of American women during too be a compelling page turner. – Rhian Sasseen
From our list: Six books that simply must be talked about
It will be out next week
📚 Darkology: Blackface and the American Way of Entertainmentand Rhae Lynn Barnes
📚 Open Space: From Earth to Eternity—A Worldwide Race to Discover and Conquer the Cosmosby David Ariosto
📚 Good Creditand Mary Costello
Your weekend Read
Are They Still Your Friends If You Can’t See Them?
By Andrew McCarthy
Sam stopped yelling and looked at me. “You really don’t have any friends, do you, Dad?”
Sam didn’t mean it in a hurtful way. As far as he knew, it was an adequate assessment.
“I have friends,” I said. “I don’t just see them, but I know they’re there. And that’s enough.”
Sam thought of me—he probably knew I was full of it (even if I didn’t at the moment)—then graciously accepted my answer with a nod. But his comment stayed with me. What had happened to my friends? Were they still there, as I claimed? What did I get from my friends, and what should I give them? I drank my tea—it was cold.
When you buy a book using a link in this newsletter, we receive a commission. Thank you for your support Atlantic.
Subscribe to The Wonder Reader, a Saturday newsletter in which our editors recommend stories to pique your curiosity and delight you.
Investigate all our magazines.
