Z żelaznego kanonu. Nadrabianie zaległości.
Jest to dobra rzecz.

An old woman is told that her cancer is terminal. Facing death, she must also face the injustices of her country, South Africa, and her time, and her place in life in that country in that time.

What is a "good life"? How much guilt do we bear for what our ancestors have done, for what others of our race, or religion, or nationality, do to others? Is is guilt by blood, by common language, by accident of birth, by association? Is our family created by blood relation or by those whose lives, whose actual blood, has touched ours?

A former college professor, she is versed in the classics. Analogies, stories, mythologies, spring to mind. But can they really help her determine the value of her life and of those who intersect it?

She is alone. She is ashamed. "Shame. Mortification. Death in life." She realizes she has never been, will never be, free. No one is free: "Freedom is always and only what is unimaginable."

Coetzee's writing is to be savored. It is rich, without excess. The words cut right to the bone.

If Coetzee's Disgrace is at least partly a meditation on the title word, this earlier novel seems to be partly a musing on the word stupefy:

Television ... the parade of politicians every evening ... their message stupidly unchanging ... Their feat, after years of etymological meditation on the word, to have raised stupidity to a virtue. To stupefy: to deprive of feeling; to benumb, deaden; to stun with amazement ... Stupid: dulled in the faculties, indifferent, destitute of thought or feeling. From stupere to be stunned, astounded. A gradient from stupid to stunned to astonished, to be turned to stone ... A message that turns people to stone ... Boars that devour their offspring. The Boar War.

The almost-unnamed narrator (seeming to be a forerunner of Coetzee's later alter-ego Elizabeth Costello) rails against stupefaction and fights it from within, but realizes its inevitability as she increasingly needs more and more pills to numb the pain of her cancer.

Her inner journey is a Dantean one, though we are also taken into an actual inferno. (The relevance of young teenage boys dying at the hands of Authority was not lost on me.) She is our Virgil, but she has her own Virgil, whose appearance on the day she receives the bad news from her doctor she takes as a sign.

She is wordy. She knows her Latin and ancient Roman history; she wonders about possible anagrams of the names of battles and medications as she falls into temporary stupor:

Borodino, Diconal: I stare at the words. Are they anagrams? They look like anagrams. But for what, and in what language? ... Borodino: an anagram for Come back in some language or other. Diconal: I call.

The dialogue she reports seems unrealistic in its wordiness, but the conceit of the whole novel -- a letter to her daughter, living in North America -- covers that possible flaw. Though I haven't read all of Coetzee, I wonder if this is perhaps his most straightforward novel.

La carta de una mujer moribunda a su hija que vive en Estados Unidos, en la que narra su particular encuentro y el lazo que construye con un indigente alcoholico en la sudáfrica del apartheid... En esta obra, la larga carta de la profesora Curren a su hija, a modo de testamento, esta llena de emociones y sentimientos intensos y contradictorios. El relato es una denuncia y un grito de auxilio también, es el destilado de alguien que se enfrenta a sus demonios en los ultimos días de su vida, y encuentra la belleza y la solidaridad en la persona menos esperada.
Coetze escribe esta novela con toda su alma y nos muestra algunas flores lozanas y bellas que nacen en la aridez. En ese cuerpo desgastado y doliente, en ese país, agotado de fealdad...
Una novela valiente y dolorosa.

Το βιβλίο αποτελεί ένα γράμμα μιας μητέρας που πάσχει από καρκίνο και ζει στη Ν. Αφρική σε μια ταραγμένη για τη χώρα περίοδο, προς την κόρη της έχει φύγει και ζει στις ΗΠΑ. Η μητέρα στη δύσκολη αυτή προσωπική στιγμή της βιώνει τη μοναξιά, αλλά και τις δυσκολίες της ασθένειάς της τα οποία μεγεθύνονται λόγω των ταραχών που έχουν ξεσπάσει εκείνη την περίοδο στη χώρα. Μόνος αρωγός της σε αυτήν της την κατάσταση ένας άστεγος τον οποίο κάποια στιγμή είχε βοηθήσει. Μέσα από το γράμμα εκφράζεται ο προβληματισμός για αυτά που συμβαίνουν γύρω της, η επιθυμία της να συνδεθεί ξανά με την κόρη, η στάση των ανθρώπων σε περιόδους έξαρσης του μίσους και της βίας και οι αντιδράσεις και συμπεριφορές μπροστά στο αναπόφευκτο αποτέλεσμα μιας ασθένειας. Προσωπικά το διάβασα ευχάριστα αλλά δε θεωρώ ότι η γραφή και το περιεχόμενο ήταν από αυτά που θα χαρακτήριζα συναρπαστικά.

Mrs. Curren lives alone in her home in Cape Town, divorced from her husband for many years, who has long since died. Her daughter has moved away to, and established a new life for herself in America. vowing to never return to her homeland.

Mrs. Curren is not well; she is dying from cancer, which her doctor diagnosed as terminal. She is writing a long letter to her daughter, hoping for it to be a goodbye, a confession, or a plea... but one day she a homeless man camps near her house, and her life changes forever as she is forced to venture out of the comfortable bubble of her existence and face the reality of the world around her.

This is my first Coetzee, and will definitely not be my last. I have always meant to read him, and I'm glad I decided to start with Age of Iron. The novel was published in 1990, in the waning days of Apartheid, but it is set somewhere in the middle 1980's, when South Africa was - literally and figuratively - in flames. Anti-Apartheid activists and organisations carried out boycotts, riots and sabotage, going as far to engage in guerilla warfare as a desperate try to end the system which has granted the white minority political, social and economic domination over the country's majority black population for four decades. In response, the government declared several successive states of emergency, which allowed the president to rule by decree and greatly expanded the power of the police and security forces. What happened next was, in words of one journalist, "detentions without trial, torture, censorship, hit-squad killings and other human rights abuses."

It's not difficult to see Mrs. Curren as a metaphor of South Africa at large, with Apartheid being the cancer slowly eating her body. Although it depends on the host, cancer cells grow and multiply themselves so extensively that they end up destroying the very tissue of the organism in which they live. There is no known cure to cancer, although some treatments might allow to cure one suffering from certain kinds of it; they might extend their lifespan for years or even decades, but nothing is certain. Even those who survived it are often left behind with physical scars and mental traumas that make continued living difficult. And in the grand scheme of things they might be considered the lucky ones; other kinds of cancer are incurable and are a death sentence. Although Apartheid is officially now only a closed chapter in South African history, the scars it left on the nation's body and soul continue to linger. Is it really over? Or are cancerous cells hiding underneath somewhere, just biding their time, counting the days to their return?

Age of Iron is an epistolary novel, and although some of Mrs. Curren's statements and proclamations sometimes sound a little too much like Coetzee speaking through her and the people she meets, his writing is powerful and striking, and carries a message that cannot be ignored. In a pivotal moment of the book, Mrs. Curren ventures into a township, probably the first time in her life that she has done so. After all, why would she, a retired, white classics lecturer, proficient in ancient Greek, Latin and Roman mythology, would ever have a reason to visit such a place? But she does, and in doing so is forever torn away from her comfortable upper-class bubble, and sees the reality of the terror and violence which the majority of her countrymen and women have to faceevery day. Now my eyes are open, she says, and I can never close them again. After reading this novel, yours will be, too.

Age and illness do much to change a classically educated woman’s perspective – on life, and on her South African society – in J.M. Coetzee's 1990 novel Age of Iron. Published toward the end of the apartheid era, this novel by a South African Nobel laureate achieves part of its power by juxtaposing the political turmoil of 1980's South Africa with the personal crisis of an interesting and engaging character.

We never learn the protagonist's full name. We know only that her last name is Curren, and that she is a Cape Town resident who was once a classical-studies professor at a university. She is fatally ill, racked by occasional bouts of increasingly severe pain. Her health status corresponds with the stricken condition of her home country of South Africa, where the apartheid regime's increasingly brutal attempts to maintain a system of white-minority rule have created a society that seems ready to collapse into civil war. Professor Curren's daughter has left South Africa, emigrated to North America, and sworn that she will never return to the R.S.A. as long as apartheid remains the law of the land; and the entire novel takes the shape of a very long letter from the dying Professor Curren to her faraway daughter.

Professor Curren has always opposed apartheid; but, like many white South Africans of her time, she has been largely insulated from the cruelty and horror of the system -- a theme explored by other South African writers, such as André Brink in A Dry White Season (1979) and Nadine Gordimer in July's People (1981). Yet a string of tragic events exposes Professor Curren to ugly realities that she has never witnessed directly; and as a classical scholar who has chronicled the fall of ancient societies, she finds herself wondering if she is witnessing the beginning of the end of her own society.

Curren's initiation into the realities of the apartheid system occurs because of events in the family life of Florence, her black housekeeper. Florence's teenage son Bheki has come under the surveillance of the apartheid security forces, in part because of his friendship with another young man known to be a militant opponent of the apartheid system. Curren's concern on behalf of Florence and her family draw her ever further into a tense and dangerous situation, to the point that she actually witnesses the security forces' burning of a black township.

Sharing these experiences with Florence is a homeless and substance-abusing man named Verceuil, who shows up sleeping at the end of her alley one day and ends up becoming part of her household -- part tormentor, part angel, part catalyst.

Age of Iron takes its title from a tense conversation between Curren and Florence regarding the “necklacings” through which suspected informers in the black townships during apartheid were killed by means of a gasoline-filled tire that was placed around their necks and ignited. Curren feels that the children have been permanently transformed by the cruelty they have perpetrated; Florence blames the behavior of these young people on the barbarity of the apartheid system and insists that “These are good children, they are like iron, we are proud of them” (p. 50). Curren then meditates on the troubling implications of Florence's statement:

Children of iron, I thought. Florence herself, too, not unlike iron. The age of iron....How long, how long before the softer ages return in their cycle, the age of clay, the age of earth? A Spartan matron, iron-hearted, bearing warrior sons for the nation. “We are proud of them.” We. Come home either with your shield or on your shield. (p. 50)

Curren associates that “children of iron” mindset in the townships with the mentality of the Afrikaners who instituted apartheid – “Voortrekkers, generation after generation of Voortrekkers, grim-faced, tight-lipped Afrikaner children, marching, singing their patriotic hymns, saluting their flag, vowing to die for their fatherland. Ons sal lewe, ons sal sterwe [“We will live, we will die," from the Afrikaner anthem "Die Stem”]. Are there not still white zealots preaching the old regime of discipline, work, obedience, self-sacrifice, a regime of death, to children some too young to tie their own shoelaces? What a nightmare from beginning to end!” (p. 51) To call this novel pessimistic, in terms of its outlook on South Africa's future prospects, would be an understatement.

We all know now, of course, that within five years after the publication of this novel, Nelson Mandela was released from his 27 years' imprisonment, South Africa held its first democratic elections, and the world watched in mingled relief and astonishment as a nation that had seemed on the brink of civil war successfully built a multiracial democracy based on principles of truth and reconciliation. On a recent visit to South Africa, I toured the Constitutional Court on Constitution Hill in Johannesburg, built where the Old Fort Prison of the apartheid system once stood -- a powerful symbol of the seemingly impossible changes that South Africa has undergone within a very short time.

Yet Age of Iron reminds us of the violence, tension, and fear that characterized South African life in the latter years of the apartheid era. Furthermore, it is an extremely well-written philosophical novel with well-drawn characters and thoughtful, personal meditations on life, illness, and mortality. Those issues are always relevant to all of us, notwithstanding the dramatic political changes that have occurred since the novel was written.

Il più duro tra i romanzi di Coetzee che ho letto; violento e profondamente inquietante, un gioiello della narrativa.
Coetzee dimostra perentoriamente d'essere uno dei pochi uomini capaci di scrivere attraverso gli occhi di una donna, impressionante.

Espléndido... a ratos.

3.5*

Ik moest dit voor Engels lezen, maar eigenlijk is het nog niet zo'n slecht boek. Beter dan Nederlandse literatuur, ja ik kijk naar zo'n beetje alle boeken die ik voor Nederlands heb moeten lezen

I finished this book with a tear inside of my heart. It's cruel and truthful, but beautiful and full of humanity. The connection between two people is not understandable, but Coetzee, the amazing Coetzee, describes it so naturally that one may think it's in fact, comprehensible. It's the essence of love, the fingerprint of sacrifice and honesty. The age of stone arrived in a crucial moment of my life, and has become one of my favourite books ever. Beautiful and imperfect, just as life is.