Although the writing is beautifully done the story was quite boring. Not exactly what the synopsis says which doesn't really help because there's not much drama at all and almost continuous complaining from the main character. I would not recommend this to anyone except for those who like stories that don't really go anywhere. It's like the last couple of years of someone's life with little to no excitement at all.

Grandiosa e potente la scrittura di Coetzee. Questo romanzo è fatto di poca trama e di molte immagini indelebili. Metafore chiare, allegorie essenziali, pensieri d’acutezza fulminante, e, per contro, quelle venature di mistero così tipiche di Coetzee. Solo, talvolta, la tendenza a perdersi un po’ nelle elucubrazioni dell’anziana protagonista, mi è parso, come sbandando un po’ in curva. Ma nell’insieme resta un gran bel libro, originale e importante, e probabilmente il migliore su quella tremenda guerra per l’apartheid.

Piccolo appunto editoriale, neanche poi tanto piccolo: perché l’età del ferro di cui si parla nel testo è diventato, nel titolo, età di ferro? La differenza di significato è notevole e il titolo originale parla chiaro: age of iron si traduce con età del ferro, come è stato appunto fatto all’interno del romanzo.

Coetzee has to be one of my favourite writers, for the way he captures the depth of human introspection in such a powerful, intense and sometimes harrowing way. This novel follows an old Classics Professor, Mrs Curren, who grapples with the effects of the apartheid, police injustice and the loss of childhood innocence in her native town in South Africa. Though this is a pretty short novel (200 pages), Coetzee still (as usual) manages to completely capture the different strains of her thinking, and the increasing disillusionment she feels at the society around her. He set an extremely high bar with Disgrace, and though this never hit the same heights, it's still worth reading and marveling over, as it showcases him doing what he does best.

Just look at that ending!!! "He took me in his arms and held me with a mighty force, so that the breath went out of me in a rush. From that embrace there was no warmth to be had." Phenomenal!!!

جدا از روح مبارزه با تبعیض نژادی و آپرتاید در آفریقای جنوبی چیزی که در این داستان خیلی من رو در بر گرفت این بود که یک خانم مسن که قبلا لاتین در دانشگاه تدریس میکرده و صاحب تفکر و تامل بوده در کنار یک پیرمرد آواره ی الکلی که قبلا ملوانی میکرده آروم میگیره.شاید دو تا آدم وقتی به هم نیازمندند و فرای نیاز کنار هم آرامش دارند طوری که میدونند قراره همه رابطه شون رو قضاوت کنن و چه بسا مسخره اما اونها همه ی اینها رو میفهمند،غیر منطقی بودن این وابستگی و کنار هم بودن رو میفهمند،آسیبی که هر کدومشون ممکنه به خاطر کنار هم نبودن ببینند رو میدونن ولی واقعا واقعا عشق یا چه بسا دوستی یا شاید این نیاز کنار هم بودن و مامن هم شدن قدرتمند تر از همه ی چیزهایی که فهمیده میشه.مثل این میمونه آدم خودش رو به جریان زندگی سپرده نه تقلایی میکنه نه جنگی نه فکری.فقط و فقط میخوان که تا جایی که زندگی بهشون مهلت میده کنار هم باشن و هم دیگرو نفس بکشن

The following notes were taken from this novel and I do not intend to take credit of any of them

• Television. Why do I watch it? The parade of politicians every evening: I have only to see the heavy, blank faces so familiar since childhood to feel gloom and nausea. The bullies in the last row of school desks, raw-boned, lumpish boys, grown up now and promoted to rule the land.
• Perhaps that is what the afterlife will be like: not a lobby with armchairs and music but a great crowded bus on its way from nowhere to nowhere. Standing room only: on one's feet forever, crushed against strangers. The air thick, stale, full of sighs and murmurs: Sorry, sorry. Promiscuous contact. Forever under the gaze of others. An end to private life.
• It was an ordinary afternoon in Africa: lazy weather, a lazy day. Almost it is possible to say: This is how life should be.
• "He is not a rubbish person," I said, lowering my voice, speaking to Florence alone. "There are no rubbish people. We are all people together."
• "And when they grow up one day," I said softly, "do you think the cruelty will leave them? What kind of parents will they become who were taught that the time of parents is over? Can parents be recreated once the idea of parents has been destroyed within us? They kick and beat a man because he drinks. They set people on fire and laugh while they burn to death. How will they treat their own children? What love will they be capable of? Their hearts are turning to stone before our eyes, and what do you say? You say, 'This is not my child, this is the white man's child, this is the monster made by the white man.' Is that all you can say? Are you going to blame them on the whites and turn your back?"
• "I would ride my brother's bicycle down hills even steeper than this one. The faster I went, the more alive I would feel. I would quiver with life as if I were about to burst through my skin. As a butterfly must feel when it is being born, or bearing itself.
• the spirit of charity has perished in this country. Because those who accept charity despise it, while those who give give with a despairing heart. What is the point of charity when it does not go from heart to heart?
• Care: the true root of charity. I look for him to care, and he does not. Because he is beyond caring. Beyond caring and beyond care.
• Life in this country is so much like life aboard a sinking ship, one of those old-time liners with a lugubrious, drunken captain and a surly crew and leaky lifeboats, I keep the shortwave radio at my bedside.
• I closed my eyes and played chords, searching with my fingers for the one chord I would recognize, when I came upon it, as my chord, as what in the old days we used to call the lost chord, the heart's chord.
• "Now that child is buried and we walk upon him. Let me tell you, when I walk upon this land, this South Africa, I have a gathering feeling of walking upon black faces.
• Letting go of myself, letting go of you, letting go of a house still alive with memories: a hard task, but I am learning.
• Easy to give alms to the orphaned, the destitute, the hungry. Harder to give alms to the bitter-hearted
• Living, said Marcus Aurelius, calls for the art of the wrestler, not the dancer. Staying on your feet is all; there is no need for pretty steps.
• The end comes galloping. I had not reckoned that as one goes downhill one goes faster and faster. I thought the whole road could be taken at an amble. Wrong, quite wrong.
• There is something degrading about the way it all ends—degrading not only to us but to the idea we have of ourselves, of humankind. People lying in dark bedrooms, in their own mess, helpless. People lying in hedges in the rain.
• Must one die in full knowledge, fully oneself? Must one give birth to one's death without anesthetic?
• Battle: nature's way of liquidating the weak and providing mates for the strong. Return covered in glory, and you shall have your desire. Gore and glory, death and sex.
• But it was not cold fingers that kept me from writing. It was the pills, which I take more of now, and more often. They are like smoke flares. I swallow them and they release a fog inside me, a fog of extinction. I cannot take the pills and go on with the writing. So without pain no writing: a new and terrible rule. Except that, when I have taken the pills, nothing is terrible anymore, everything is indifferent, everything is the same.
• "Television can't make you sick. It's just pictures." "There is no such thing as just pictures. There are men behind the pictures. They send out their pictures to make people sick. You know what I am talking about."
• I have no illusions about my condition, doctor. It is not care I need, just help with the pain."
• There is no lie that does not have at its core some truth. One must only know how to listen.
• One must love what is nearest. One must love what is to hand, as a dog loves.
• I cannot stand it. But it is time to begin getting used to what I cannot stand.
• No, I wish your children life. But the wings you have tied on them will not guarantee them life. Life is dust between the toes. Life is dust between the teeth. Life is biting the dust.
• He needs the help only a woman can give a man. Not a seduction but an induction. He does not know how to love. I speak not of the motions of the soul but of something simpler. He does not know how to love as a boy does not know how to love.
• I have cancer from the accumulation of shame I have endured in my life. That is how cancer comes about: from self-loathing the body turns malignant and begins to eat away at itself.
• You do not believe in words. You think only blows are real, blows and bullets.
• Opinions must be heard by others, heard and weighed, not merely listened to out of politeness.
• I still detest these calls for sacrifice that end with young men bleeding to death in the mud. War is never what it pretends to be. Scratch the surface and you find, invariably, old men sending young men to their death in the name of some abstraction or other.
• the future comes disguised, if it came naked we would be petrified by what we saw
• What times these are when to be a good person is not enough!
• I begin to understand the true meaning of the embrace. We embrace to be embraced. We embrace our children to be folded in the arms of the future, to pass ourselves on beyond death, to be transported. That is how it was when I embraced you, always. We bear children in order to be mothered by them.
• To whom this writing then? The answer: to you but not to you; to me; to you in me.
• So day by day I render myself into words and pack the words into the page like sweets: like sweets for my daughter, for her birthday, for the day of her birth. Words out of my body, drops of myself, for her to unpack in her own time, to take in, to suck, to absorb.
• Children cannot conceive of what it is to die. It never crosses their minds that they may not be immortal.
• Heaven. I imagine heaven as a hotel lobby with a high ceiling and the Art of Fugue coming softly over the public-address system. Where one can sit in a deep leather armchair and be without pain. A hotel lobby full of old people dozing, listening to the music, while souls pass and repass before them like vapors, the souls of all. A place dense with souls. Clothed? Yes, clothed, I suppose; but with empty hands. A place to which you bring nothing but an abstract kind of clothing and the memories inside you, the memories that make you. A place without incident. A railway station after the abolition of trains. Listening to the heavenly unending music, waiting for nothing, paging idly through the store of memories.
• Yet dying without succession is—forgive me for saying this—so unnatural. For peace of mind, for peace of soul, we need to know who comes after us, whose presence fills the rooms we were once at home in.
• Death is the only truth left. Death is what I cannot bear to think. At every moment when I am thinking of something else, I am not thinking death, am not thinking the truth.
• "These are good children, they are like iron, we are proud of them."
• so what is it to me that a time has come when childhood is despised, when children school each other never to smile, never to cry, to raise fists in the air like hammers? Is it truly a time out of time, heaved up out of the earth, misbegotten, monstrous?
• How easy it is to love a child, how hard to love what a child turns into!
• "Why won't you go to school?" "What is school for? It is to make us fit into the apartheid system."
• "Because that is something one should never ask of a child," I went on: "to enfold one, comfort one, save one. The comfort, the love should flow forward, not backward. That is a rule, another of the iron rules. When an old person begins to plead for love everything turns squalid. Like a parent trying to creep into bed with a child: unnatural.
• when you bear a child from your own body you give your life to that child. Above all to the first child, the firstborn. Your life is no longer with you, it is no longer yours, it is with the child. That is why we do not really die: we simply pass on our life, the life that was for a while in us, and are left behind. I am just a shell, as you can see, the shell my child has left behind.
• I did not like him. I do not like him. I look into my heart and nowhere do I find any trace of feeling for him. As there are people to whom one spontaneously warms, so there are people to whom one is, from the first, cold. That is all.
• I, a white. When I think of the whites, what do I see? I see a herd of sheep (not a flock: a herd) milling around on a dusty plain under the baking sun. I hear a drumming of hooves, a confusion of sound that resolves itself, when the ear grows attuned, into the same bleating call in a thousand different inflections: "I!" "I!" "I!" And, cruising among them, bumping them aside with their bristling flanks, lumbering, saw-toothed, red-eyed, the savage, unreconstructed old boars grunting "Death!" "Death!"
• perhaps it is because of the dog that I trust him. Dogs, which sniff out what is good, what evil: patrollers of boundaries: sentries.
• "It is like trying to give up alcohol," I persisted. "Trying and trying, always trying, but knowing in your bones from the beginning that you are going to slide back. There is a shame to that private knowledge, a shame so warm, so intimate, so comforting that it brings more shame flooding with it. There seems to be no limit to the shame a human being can feel.
• "I have held on to that story all my life. If each of us has a story we tell to ourself about who we are and where we come from, then that is my story. That is the story I choose, or the story that has chosen me. It is there that I come from, it is there that I begin.
• Children of iron, I thought. Florence herself, too, not unlike iron. The age of iron. After which comes the age of bronze. How long, how long before the softer ages return in their cycle, the age of clay, the age of earth?
• After all, what one wants in the end: someone to be there, to call to in the dark. Mother, or whoever is prepared to stand in for mother.
• His look had grown uglier. No doubt I grow uglier too by the day. Metamorphosis, that thickens our speech, dulls our feelings, turns us into beasts.
• I wrote. I write. I follow the pen, going where it takes me.
• Death may indeed be the last great foe of writing, but writing is also the foe of death.

Great lead charachter, her courage lifted this often depressing story of apartheid and death.

Một tác phẩm nữa của J.M.Coetzee đặt nhân vật của mình vào một tình thế mất kết nối, bất lực khi lí tưởng và thực tại quá khác biệt. (Và luôn xuất hiện những chi tiết khiến người đọc bất an.)
"- Sau khi tôi đi rồi, anh sẽ làm gì?
- Tôi tiếp tục sống.
- Chắc chắn là thế rồi, nhưng sẽ có ai trong đời anh nữa?
Anh ta mỉm cười khiêm tốn. "Tôi cần có ai trong đời nữa sao?"
Không phải một câu đáp mà là một câu hỏi thật sự. Anh ta không biết nữa."

Glavna junakinja, umirovljena profesorica latinskog jezika koja se suočava sa neizlječivim rakom i koja se priprema za svoju vlastitu smrt svojevrsna je alegorija Južnoafričke Republike u čijem se glavnom gradu odvija radnja romana. Glavnu junakinju kao i njenu državu tijekom romana iznutra izjeda neizlječiva bolest prepuna strašne fizičke boli koju pokušava barem nakratko ušutkati analgeticima. No, od samog je početka jasno da će bolest odnijeti pobjedu jer je organizam koji napada i kojim se hrani naprosto nemoguće održati na životu. Roman je pisan u formi pisma kojeg glavna junakinja piše svojoj kćeri koja se odselila u Sjedinjene Američke Države. Kroz ta oproštajna pisma ona joj prepričava dane predavanja vlastitoj bolesti, period koji provodi sa slučajnim suputnikom, beskućnikom koji se naselio u njeno dvorište i s kojim nema ništa zajedničko no koji joj silom prilika postaje jedina bliska osoba. U istom tom periodu svjedoči i tragediji svoje spremačice čiji petnaestogodišnji sin zajedno sa svojim razrednim prijateljem tragično strada u nemirima u kojima buja otpor spram aparheida. Iako pokušava pomoći i u jednom i u drugom slučaju glavna junakinja zapravo se suočava sa svojom nemoći, ali se svejedno buni riječima, iznoseći mnoštvo političkih stavova kojima precizno dijagnosticira bolest koja proždire društvo, silno kritizirajući rasizam u oba smjera.

Evo par rečenica koje su mi se učinile jako spretno napisanima:

"I ja sam bolesna", rekla sam. "Bolesna i umorna, umorna i bolesna. U sebi nosim dijete koje ne mogu roditi. Ne mogu, zato što se ono ne želi roditi. Zato što one može živjeti izvan mene. Dakle, ono je moj zatočenik, ili sam ja njegov zatočenik. Ono udara po vatima, ali ne može otići."

"Puna zebnje, vozila sam u tamu. Pramenje magle lebdjelo je prema nama, grlilo auto, i odlebdjelo iza nas. Sablasti, duhovi. "

"Ležeći sve te godine u sigurnim skrovištima diljem zemlje, u albumima, po ladicama, ova i tisuće fotografija nalik njoj neprimjetno su sazrele, preobrazile se. Fiksir nije izdržao, te je razvijanje pošlo dalje nego što je itko mogao sanjati - tko bi znao kako se to dogodilo? - te se sve vratilo u negativ, novu vrstu negativa na kojima počinjemo nazirati što je nekad ležalo i skrivalo se izvan okvira."

"Smrt, uistinu, može biti najveći neprijatelj pisanju, ali je i pisanje također neprijatelj smrti."

"Zapravo se obraćam tvojoj duši, jer će moja duša ostati uza te kad jednom okončam ovo pismo. Izlazeći poput noćnog leptira iz kukljice, šireći krila - nadam se da ćeš to, čitajući primijetiti - moju dušu koja se pokreće na novi let"

"Ove riječi, dok ih čitaš, ako ih čitaš, ulaze u tebe i ponovno dolaze do daha. One su, ako želiš, način na koji nastavljam živjeti. Jednom si ti živjela u meni, kao što sam i ja jednom živjela u mojoj majci, i kako ona, dok sam sve bliža njoj, živi u meni, možda i ja zaživim u tebi."

n  “Dunque senza dolore niente scrittura: una nuova terribile regola.”n

----------

”Lo stesso giorno in cui il dottor Syfret mi ha comunicato la notizia. Una brutta notizia...”


Lo stesso giorno Mrs Curren – un'insegnante in pensione- comincia a scrivere alla figlia emigrata negli Stati Uniti.
Lo stesso giorno in cui scopre che, nel vialetto di fianco al garage, un vagabondo ha allestito la sua dimora di cartoni e teli di plastica.
Lo stesso giorno in cui inizia ad accorgersi che tutto si sta sgretolando.

“è l’ora del fuoco, è ora di farla finita; è ora che nasca ciò che dalla cenere può nascere.”

Con un movimento speculare si assiste all'avanzare di un male che divora dentro il corpo come fosse una gestazione maligna.
Allo stesso modo procede a macchia d'olio quel processo distruttivo che si nutre di odio, ovvero, l'elemento fondante della nazione sud- africana.
Mrs Curren diventa testimone dell'avanzare di quelle nuove generazioni cariche di rabbia che s'immolano a riscattare orgogli feriti.

”Questa storia non è privata, signora Curren. Lo sa bene. Non c’è piú niente di privato.”

Coetzee ritorna al tema fondamentale della Storia che entra nelle singole esistenze scardinando con prepotenza ogni tentativo di non essere testimoni:
si è costretti a guardare e a vivere nel disagio di essere complici indiretti di antiche colpe.

E la vergogna è il cardine:

”Ecco il ruolo della vergogna: era un punto di riferimento, qualcosa che restava sempre al suo posto, qualcosa verso cui poter tornare, come un cieco, qualcosa da toccare, che ti indicasse il punto in cui ti trovavi. Per il resto ho mantenuto una discreta distanza dal mio senso di vergogna. Non ho esagerato. La vergogna non è mai diventata un piacere indecente; non ha mai smesso di mordermi. Non ne ero orgogliosa, me ne vergognavo. La mia vergogna, solo mia. Cenere nella mia bocca giorno dopo giorno dopo giorno, che non ha mai smesso di avere il sapore della cenere.

***********************

Ogni volta che finisco di leggere un libro di Coetzee mi riprometto di prendere le distanze da questo autore.
Distanze, sì.
Intervalli temporali che mi consentano di riprendere il mio naturale ritmo di respiro perchè non c'è dubbio che ciò che ha scritto e come lo ha scritto mi toglie letteralmente il fiato.
Non è un eufemismo: ci sono passaggi di lettura che mi bloccano il respiro.

Ma c'è di più...

” Il complimento più straordinario che si possa fare a uno scrittore è: «Ho letto un libro che avrei voluto scrivere io». Oppure: «Ha detto quello che io pensavo da sempre». Oh sí, questa è decisamente la cosa più bella che si possa dire a uno scrittore. (…) Vuol dire che quello scrittore ha reso universale un’esperienza personale.” [“Manuale di lettura creativa” di Marcello Fois]

Ecco questo mi succede con Coetzee: mi toglie il fiato perchè dice esattamente quello che penso e nel modo in cui mi sarebbe piaciuto dirlo.
C'è una straordinaria sinergia tra un contenuto già di per sé “forte” ed una carica semantica che ha dell'esplosivo.
Boom!!!!!!

Coetzee at his best. Mrs. Curren is a typical Coetzee character - a person at a point in life tht has forced him or her to be introspective and discover that word around them is full of mindless violence and hypocrisies. The result is a Hamlet like paralysis.

Since Mrs. Curren is dying, death gets its bit of focus in her thoughts.

Like with Foe and Disgrace, the guilt of belonging to a race that has been oppressors for generations is present.

But what distinguishes Coetzee from other authors writing on such themes is his refusal to sentimentalise or mysterise the issues to extent of turning it into a liberal kitsch.

#Libro

"The dead boys were unlovable in their intolerance [...] but I do not want to die in the state of ugliness. I must love the unlovable".