Coetzee’s recurrent themes

I find J M Coetzee's recurrent themes in his later novels--"the aging protagonist, the attraction to a younger woman, the presentiment of death, the physical and emotional isolation from the modern world"--as identifeid by Siddhartha Deb in this review--quite fascinating, as facinating as a thriller's plotline. Siddhartha says that these themes "have been no less than the vital signs of a culture, one possibly in its death throes."

Coetzee's works are short and his language too is "deceptively simple". I like this writing style so much that I have developed a disinclination toward reading anything that uses flowery language, or expresses emotions in hysterical tones.

Here's Siddhartha's analysis of Coetzee's work:

Elizabeth Costello is structured through a series of lectures delivered by the eponymous protagonist, an Australian writer who is a fierce campaigner for animal rights. Art, politics, the sanctity of life, the aging human body—all these come together in that book, culminating in a brilliant final section that reworks the “Before the Law” episode in Kafka’s The Trial. But what makes the novel particularly idiosyncratic is the fact that every one of Costello’s lectures has actually been delivered by Coetzee. In his next novel, Slow Man (2005), Coetzee begins straightforwardly, writing about an elderly photographer injured in a traffic accident. But a third of the way through, a character called Elizabeth Costello shows up, claiming that the photographer is a character in a novel she is working on.

By the time we come to Diary of a Bad Year, then, it is possible to see that its formal play and many of its themes—the aging protagonist, the attraction to a younger woman, the presentiment of death, the physical and emotional isolation from the modern world—have been presented to us by Coetzee for a while now. This has not always been a successful approach—Slow Man, especially, is a slim novel weakened by its experimental diet—but no one can accuse Coetzee of being caught up in the trivial.

The books have all been short, the language deceptively simple, but Coetzee’s recurrent themes have been no less than the vital signs of a culture, one possibly in its death throes. Diary of a Bad Year may be his most successful diagnosis yet of what we are suffering from, one that even offers hope in the form of resistance, critical thought, and the odd, imperfect humanity that emerges in the story of Anya and Señor C. In other writers, such hope would appear trite, but we know that Coetzee is no sentimentalist. His humanism has always been hard-won, wrested from those early lessons in authoritarianism and opposition, and this brilliant novel shows how much better prepared Coetzee is than many Western writers to come to terms with our new age.

(Thanks Prof Amitava Kumar)