Wow. Fantastische, sensitieve, gelaagde lezingen van andere auteurs om de vraag te beantwoorden of er zoiets bestaat als 'het klassieke', en, zo ja, wat dat dan is. Het essay over Zbigniew Herbert hoort tot het beste wat ik heb gelezen dit jaar.

Exactly how does one of the greatest living practitioners of the novel feel about other great novelists? J.M.Coetzee rarely gives interviews. So, it is a real joy to read his thoughts on literature. STRANGER SHORES: ESSAYS 1986 TO 1999 is a real gem.

It contatins 29 essays from Coetzee's lecture called 'What is a Classic?' to brilliant pieces on Kafka, Borges, Rushdie, A.S.Byatt, Caryl Philips, and Dostoevsky. Coetzee even ventures outside his obscession to dwell on photography and the Rugby World Cup of 1995.

My favourite essay is called 'The Autobiography of Dorris Lessing.' This really made me want to read one of South Africa's greatest writers. It is pleasing to read this sentence: "Lessing has never been a great stylist - she writes too fast and prunes too lightly for that." It is views like these that reveal a lot about Coetzee himself. He, as most of his readers would know, is the opposite of Lessing in terms of prose.

I would recommend this book to anyone who has a serious interst in how great novelists feel about their fellow soldiers in the battlefield of literature with a capital 'L'.

More than a bit of a bore compared to my earlier read of Inner Workings: Literary Essays 2000-2005 which was fantastic. Nothing much of interest to me here keeping me glued to the pages.

Heran nggak senikmat fiksinya...

I read only the essays about author I knew and they were interesting but very difficult.

Ho letto solo i saggi sugli autori che conoscevo ed erano piuttosto difficili, ma interessanti.

uneven, but interesting.

Here is a fine book of literary criticism by a true scholar. Coetzee displays wide and deep knowledge of novelists and poets from around the world and from many eras. It was wonderful to read a critic who obviously loves literature and cares enough about his subject to know what he's talking about and to give the works and their authors a fair shake.

I love Coetzee. He is one of my top three favorite living authors and his books have greatly influenced me. Because of this, I had high hopes for his literary essays. But instead of discussing anything noteworthy to fans of the author (i.e., his assessment of the current state of literature, the evolution as he sees it of storytelling in the last few decades), these essays deal with obscure topics that mainly focus on other modern literary critiques. If you want to read critiques of critiques, this is for you. I was never able to become invested in anything the essays focused on and gave up before finishing, which I almost never do, and certainly not for one of my favorite authors. Very disappointing.

Coetzee's essay on Rushdie is the greatest essay written in the last 30 years bar none. Very few can scold Rushdie like a school boy and be taken seriously.

Not my cup of tea. First essay is a dry writing on what is a classic. Most of the rest of the essays are about authors I am not familiar with so I quit.

A collection of literary criticism essays? Must be my first; well, maybe about half a century ago, in high school, I had to read a few essays when preparing for the rigorous graduation exam. Yet if the essays have been written by one of my favorite authors, J.M. Coetzee, I just had to try. "Stranger Shores. Literary Essays 1986 - 1999" totally captivates: another great work of the master. The twenty six essays deal with a wide spectrum of writers, for instance, Borges, Defoe, Dostoyevsky, Kafka, Mulisch, Oz, Rilke, Rushdie, Turgenev, and a number of South African authors and writers with roots in Africa, including Nadine Gordimer and Doris Lessing, both - like Coetzee - Nobel Prize winners.

"Stranger Shores" is a rather loose collection of essays whose common denominator is their extremely high quality: incisive depth and superb writing. Thus, in this review (characterized by lack of depth and lame writing) I will just offer somewhat random comments on a few essays with which I have stronger thematic connections because of my heritage and background. No organizing theme can be discerned in this review

The novel "In the Dutch Mountains" (from the essay "Cees Nooteboom, Novelist and Traveler") instantaneously made my To Read list. Let's quote Coetzee: "This version of the Snow Queen story constitutes the pre-text of Nooteboom's novel. But the pre-text is surrounded by a substantial frame, namely the story of how the Snow Queen story gets to be told [...]" A must read.

In the essay about R.M. Rilke ("William Gass's Rilke") Coetzee quotes the German poet's vibrant passage "We are the bees of the invisible, [...] Tremulously we gather in the honey of the visible to store up in the great golden hive of the Invisible". And that refers to the American-style mass production of items that were flooding European market in the early 1900s, items that no longer were like the originals, the ones "into which the hopes and pensiveness of our forefathers have been transfused..."

In the piece entitled "The Essays of Joseph Brodsky" Coetzee writes, among many other issues, about how Brodsky suggests to Vaclav Havel, the first president of the free Czechoslovakia, to "drop the pretense that Communism in Central Europe was imposed from abroad and acknowledge that it was the result of 'an extraordinary anthropological backslide'". Regardless of whether we agree with Brodsky or not, it quite strikes me that a South African writer, a citizen of Australia, writes with great insight about the subtle differences of opinions between Brodsky, Havel, and Solzhenitsyn.

"The Autobiography of Doris Lessing" is a fascinating essay, with strong contemporary relevance. Coetzee explores Lessing's Communist phase and emphasizes the unfashionable yet deeply moral questions she raised: Why did many Western intellectuals who supported Stalin and Stalinism believed Soviet lies against the evidence of their own eyes? And even more important "Why does no one any longer care?" Further, Coetzee praises Lessing's unwillingness to bend to the political correctness climate of the 1990s and points out that she herself rightly traces the correctness to the Party and the Party line.

To me, the first essay, "What Is A Classic?: A Lecture" stands out. Its starting point is a lecture that Thomas Stearns Eliot gave in 1944, in which he argued that the civilization of Western Europe is a single civilization that is descended from Rome, thus making Aeneid, Virgil's epic of Rome, the originary classic. Coetzee uses the example of Bach's music as "some kind of touchstone because [Bach] has passed the scrutiny of hundreds of thousands of intelligences before me, by hundreds of thousands of fellow human beings." Yet for the "most serious" answer to the question "What is a classic?" Coetzee follows the lead of Zbigniew Herbert, who - drawing from Polish history - provides a dramatic definition of a classic. Coetzee summarizes it saying that a classic is "what survives the worst of barbarism, surviving because generations of people cannot afford to let go of it and therefore hold on to it at all costs."

I can't wait to read Coetzee's other collections of essays.

Four and a half stars.

I started reading J. M. Coetzee's Stranger Shores: Essays 1986-1999 thinking, "Well, I'll just give it a try." I found myself being enthralled by the author's South African perspective of both the West and his own native land. Then, too, most of the essays were about writers with whom I wasn't familiar, largely from the Netherlands, Germany, Israel and the Middle East, and finally South Africa.

Years ago, I had read two or three of Coetzee's novels and found them interesting, particularly Waiting for the Barbarians. I am delighted to find a contemporary essayist whose work I can use to send me off in some new directions. I have already purchased Doris Lessing's The Golden Notebook and am looking for a good edition of Breyten Breytenbach's Dog Heart.

It is too easy for a reader such as myself to get into a rut: I think Coetzee's Stranger Shores may be an antidote.