Lo unico que vale la pena?
La pena unica que me valiø?

Good, but too relentless.

Coetzee has recently emerged as one of the leading figures in contemporary fiction. His style is dark, obscure, and undeniably Kafkaesque. If you'd like to learn who his other literary influences are, this volume is an excellent help.

Coetzee is highly preoccupied with modernist German literature. There are some excellent reviews in here on Walter Benjamin, Paul Celan, Gunter Grass, and Robert Musil. He also weighs in on American heavy-weights like William Faulkner and Saul Bellow.

The bulk of the content in here is predominantly biographical. I particularly enjoyed his discussion of Faulkner's peculiarly hermetic life, as well as his elaboration on the common view of Benjamin's final days in Europe.

More literary biographies than criticism, but biographical trivia feeds the engine of fantasy, so: pretty fun.

(side note: coetzee seems to be a man who reads through ouevres and gets the ideas and links them together (in not necessarily all taht rigorous of a way), which is maybe related to how he began his academic training in mathematics)

'Inner Workings' is a collection of essays written by J.M.Coetzee,
between 2000-2005. In this book he ponders overs works of some of the
great authors in the past and present century. The set of authors
whose work Coetzee reviews are mostly from Europe and America (barring
Marquez, Naipaul and Gordimer).

His musings on these authors and their writings are beautifully
written. As is usual with Coetzee his writing is succinct, lucid, and
almost poetic. For his reviews Coetzee makes well use of his extensive
erudition and traces links between the author's work and their earlier
works, autobiographical elements from author's life, any influences
that would have inspired the author. This provides a broader context
to the work he is writing about generating a strong interest in
reader's mind to go and read (re-read) the works that have been
reviewed .

I enjoyed Coetzee's eloquence but found such selective chapters on what amounts to twenty one writers not useful. Every time Coetzee has engaged his readers interest in a writer, it's soon over and we're introduced to a totally different writer.

1st edition US

A collection of his book reviews.

This book is primarily a collection of essays that were originally published in the New York Review of Books, but it also includes some book introductions. Most worthwhile are the essays on less well-known authors like Hugo Claus, Bruno Schulz, and Robert Walser. Although Walser like Marai has become better known over the past decade. Some of my personal favorites like Robert Musil, Samuel Beckett, and Joseph Roth are included. English language writers are well represented from Whitman through Gordimer. Specific works by Arthur Miller and Philip Roth are discussed along with Gabriel Garcia Marquez and V. S. Naipaul. Coetzee is a well read author who writes intelligent, interesting essays. This collection is one worth exploring.

Some of the essays are interesting but overall I felt bored reading the book.

This book is valuable for two reasons: the writing about the individual authors, and seeing Coetzee's perspective on these authors. Unfortunately, each essay is usually only valuable for one of the reasons. But that's a minor complaint considering how much better Coetzee writes about these authors than almost every other living critic. He knows the languages that many of the works are translated from, and that helps him illuminate things that would be lost on the rest of us.
MUCH better than his other collections of essays.

9/10