This book is the ur-archetype of so many South African novels that followed in its footsteps in terms of the staging of the domestic / suburban encounter between coloniser and colonised.

Personally I find it better than his memories. It’s a very nice book but still not one of my favorites, I’ll say. However, I can say for sure I know Coetzee’s literature. Whew.

Coetzee’s novel Age of Iron is perhaps one of his most gripping and politically-charged works concerning the turmoil of South African history. Elizabeth Curren is the protagonist who narrates the novel, which she addresses as an extended letter to her estranged daughter living comfortably in America with her husband and family. Widowed and dying of cancer, Ms. Curren’s voice takes on a heartbroken and disillusioned tone as she recounts her memories and experiences of the wasted chance of life for her embattled country during the age of apartheid. Ms. Curren witnesses the horrifying reality of bloodshed and unrest that inevitably infiltrates her home as her devoted housekeeper's young son, Bheki, succumbs to the activist violence of the period. The only confidant she has among the encroaching madness comes from a homeless man, an alcoholic named Vercureil. In trying to impart a morality on Vercureil, her helplessness and anger deepen as she also tries to convince Bheki and his friend to abandon their allegiance to activism, which the police prey upon. Coetzee depicts the mindset of the boys as afflicted. He shows how the younger generation’s blind and obsessive devotion to a cause greater than their selves hardens them into an iron-like commitment to die fighting for justice. Coetzee conveys how they see their lives as expendable, ready to be sacrificed in death for the cause of resistance. Coetzee offers a dismal, although entirely truthful, picture of the misery and injustice that fuels selfless acts of rebellion. Once again, he has confronted the social evils of his homeland using prose that bristles with insight and a story that generates heart-wrenching remorse.

J.M. Coetzee – Prémio Nobel da Literatura, 2003
"que com inumeráveis disfarces retrata o envolvimento surpreendente do forasteiro"


A Idade do Ferro é um romance intenso e melancólico passado na África do Sul durante os últimos anos do apartheid. A protagonista, Elizabeth Curren, é uma professora universitária reformada que descobre estar na fase terminal de um cancro. Sem esperanças e distante da filha, que emigrou para os Estados Unidos, decide escrever-lhe uma longa carta, transformando a narrativa numa espécie de testemunho e reflexão sobre a sua vida e sobre o estado do seu país.

Ao longo da história, Elizabeth confronta-se com a violência e a brutalidade do regime segregacionista. A sua relação com Florence, a sua empregada doméstica negra, e, sobretudo, com Vercueil, um sem-abrigo alcoólico que se instala perto da sua casa, são catalisadores de mudanças profundas na sua visão do mundo. A morte violenta do filho de Florence durante uns protestos intensifica o seu sentimento de impotência e culpa.

A deterioração física de Elizabeth é também uma metáfora para a decadência moral e social da África do Sul. A sua dor pessoal e o sofrimento do país entrelaçam-se, evidenciando a brutalidade de um sistema que desumaniza todos. Está velha, doente e sem esperança, é um retrato da fragilidade, mas também da lucidez.
Vercueil, por mais inesperado que pareça, acaba por tornar-se a única companhia verdadeira da protagonista, acompanhando-a nos seus últimos dias. A amizade entre os dois é muito marcante.

Coetzee cria uma narrativa poderosa e profundamente angustiante e o impacto emocional que provoca é grande.

88/198 – África do Sul

In this novel, Coetzee explores the likelihood of transcending the power relations which characterize South African society. The novel portrays the internal expedition of Mrs. Curren, an old classics professor.

She lives in the Cape Town of the Agartheid era, where she is little by little dying of cancer. She has been philosophically opposed to the Apartheid government her entire life, but has never taken a vigorous stance against it.

Now, at the closing stages of her life, she lastly comes face-to-face with the horrors of the system. She witnesses the burning of a black township and the killing of her servant’s son, over and above the shooting by security forces of a young black activist whom she shelters in her house.

Against a milieu of aggression by whites and blacks alike, Mrs. Curren remembers her past and her daughter, who left South Africa because of the state of affairs in the country: the book is framed as an unmitigated letter from the mother to her daughter in America.

As the narrative progresses, she builds a relationship of a dissimilar kind with Vercueil an old destitute, who happens to be sleeping in her driveway, as well as lastly becoming accurately aware of Florence, her black live-in servant.

Coetzee brings together significant themes in this book: aging, narrative representation, the connotation of autonomy, and the position of the white liberal in Apartheid South Africa.

Classic.

The last days of Apartheid combined with the last days of a dying woman makes for a dark dark novel in an era of dark novels. The use of a female narrator by a man always gets my antenae up. But Coetzee had so many things to say for her I found it hard to believe she was written by a he.


For example when Mrs. Curran's maid leaves her for a stretch of time and later returns she reflects:

"When Florence went off at the beginning of the month I asured her I could cope with the housework. But of course I let everything slide, and soon a sour, clammy odor prevaded the upstairs, an odor of cold cream, dirty sheets, talcum powder. Now I had to follow shamefacedly after her as she took stock. Hands on hips, nostrils flaring, spectacles gleaming, she surveyed the evidence of my incompetence. Then she set to work. By the end of the afternoon the kitchen and bathroon were shining, the bedroom was crisp and neat, there was a smell of furniture polish in the air. "Wonderful, Florence," I said, producing the ritual phrases. "I don't know what I would do without you." But of course I do know. I would sink into the indifferent squalor of old age."

I am just agog that a man would know to write this.

His descriptions of the horrors of Apartheid - written with so many levels. An example:

"We were at the rear of a crowd hundreds strong looking down upon a scen of devastation: shanties burnt and smoldering, shanties still burning, pouring forth black smoke. Jumbles of furniture, bedding household objects stood in the pouring rain. Gangs of men were at work trying to rescue the contents of the burning shacks, going from one to another, putting out the fires; or so I thought till with a shock it came to me that these were no rescuers but incendiaries, that he battle I saw them waging was nt with the flames but with the rain."

Perhaps only a female narrator could make the painfully sensitive reflections on the politics of South Africa:

"I want to rage against the men who have created these times. I want to accuse them of spoiling my life in the way that a rat or a cockroach spoils food without even eating it, simply by walking over it and sniffing it and performing its bodily funcitons on it..."

“Comecei a perceber o verdadeiro sentido do abraço. Abraçamos para sermos abraçados. Abraçamos os nossos filhos para sermos cingidos nos braços do futuro, para passarmos além da morte, para nos sentirmos transportados. Era assim quando eu te abraçava, sempre assim. Geramos filhos para que eles nos sirvam de mães. Verdades nuas e cruas, verdades de mãe: daqui até ao final, não ouvirás da minha boca outra coisa. Portanto: como desejei ter-te aqui! Como desejei poder subir ao teu quarto, sentar-me na tua cama, passar os dedos pelo teu cabelo, segredar-te ao ouvido como costumava fazer nas manhãs de escola «São horas de levantar!». E depois, quando te virasses, corpo morno de sangue, hálito de leite, tomar-te nos braços, naquilo a que chamávamos «dar um grande abraço à Mamã», e cujo sentido secreto, cujo sentido nunca enunciado, era que a Mamã não devia ficar triste, porque em vez de morrer continuaria a viver em ti.”

I have been warned that one cannot tell Coetzee what is, or what is not, a novel. Well, warning-be-damned: this is barely a novel.

It's an exploration of philosophical and moral concepts through the lens of a character. A character who stops in the middle of a muddy, bloody, burning village to speak to a man about her feelings on Apartheid. A character who writes a letter to her daughter that is not only two-hundred pages long, but that also include a precise and unsentimental premonition of her own death. It is barely a novel, and like Coetzee's other barely-novels, it is weighty, ruthlessly moral, gorgeous, human, brilliant, painful, and, dare I say perfect.

I imagine that, much like I do these days, Coetzee sat in his bed in Apartheid South Africa and tried to imagine what a white person could do, could really do, to help end a regime of white supremacist violence. I think that all of the difficult, contradictory, and often pitiful thoughts that came to him went into this book. Too many quotes to write down, too many beautiful scenes to relate. A story for our times; for times of decay and resistance, of guilt and redemption. Read it!

Coetzee has been on my radar for a while. A few years back, I looked over a list of Booker Prize winners and saw that he had won it twice (only one other author has done so, if I remember right). So I figured he would be worth reading.

Then, preparing for the 2012-13 school year, I decided to organize my AP Literature class around stages of life, with fourth quarter being old age and death. I went hunting for titles and came across "Age of Iron." I ended up choosing "Gilead" instead, so I read "Age of Iron" for personal enjoyment, not professional reconnaissance.

I was struck early on by two remarkable similarities between the two books. Both take the form of letters from a parent to a child, and before "Gilead," I had never read any book in such a form. And in both cases, the author creates a narrator/letter writer of the opposite gender, and does so in a remarkably convincing, insightful way.

I can't say that I loved "Age of Iron" as I did "Gilead," a book that had me feeling rapturous about its beautiful use of language, but I will say that Coetzee's novel provided very satisfying personal enjoyment and is definitely worth reading. This author has earned his stripes.

A woman comes home to her fine old house on the day she has been diagnosed with cancer. She finds, living next to her garage, a homeless man and his dog. Through the novel, an unlikely relationship unfolds between them. I can think of few relationships in all of literature that develop so richly, in so nuanced a way, with such a mixture of haphazardness and inexorability.

The novel is set in South Africa in the time of apartheid. As the narrator confronts her cancer, she is also forced through various events to confront the horrible cost of racism and civil strife in her country. Coetzee deals profoundly with both cancers--the personal, medical one and the national, metaphoric one. The novel's engagement with broad social issues and intimate personal ones shows this author's impressive range.

The narrator in some ways represents the weight of tradition. She made her living teaching Latin and the classics. At first in denial about the loss of humanity in her country, she eventually must face it and is appalled. But she expresses her personal journey into the Age of Iron (her label for the brutal present) in language appropriate to her training--rich in allusion, steeped in timeless wisdom, glowing with poetry.

How many authors can sustain poetic language for pages at a time while building a compelling storyline, a piercing social commentary, and an amazingly complex, tender relationship? Coetzee moves in the rarefied air inhabited by geniuses like Salman Rushdie, Toni Morrison, and Cormac McCarthy. I feel that I have discovered for myself one of the best writers of our time, and while I may be a little more in awe of this novel than in love with it, I highly recommend it.

Ugh. I suppose it's brilliant, but it was so painful to read. The similes and metaphors were a bit tired, nothing terribly original. The subject matter is really what saved it, if anything did. Not a book I'll ever re-read.

The author asks a pertinent question of the reader, and of the protagonist, in that is it enough to wish good but take no action to achieve it? The main character struggles with this question and somehow never fully absolves herself of it but takes the reader on that journey. A quite uniquely told character development in my opinion. Overall the main characters avoid being pigeon holed into being good or bad and the opaqueness of this judgement is the most tantalising thread throughout the book.

This is a wonderful, complex novel. the sort that reminds the reader why the author is so widely, highly regarded. I could not stop reading it, nightmare after nightmare. I could not stop imagining it. And the ending - the anti climatic ending - was so essential.

I would love to have read this in South Africa in the late 80s, as the world was crumbling and power was so rapidly shifting. But as a Canadian who is constantly struggling with my own colonial reality, this was an instructive and terrible book. It almost feels as though we are just starting to get caught up to South Africa - a land where heroes were possible until they became martyrs.

The best part is how Coetzee uses space in this novel. Space is essential!