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J.M. Coetzee This is the concluding part of a series began in the last week of September. John Maxwell Coetzee is the last African and second South African to have won the Nobel Prize in Literature. Currently J.M. Coetzee is a citizen of Australia. Born in Cape Town on February 9, 1940, Coetzee attended St. Joseph's College and later studied Mathematics and English at the University of Cape Town, graduating in 1960 and 1961 with Bachelor of Arts with Honours and  Honours in Mathematics respectively. Coetzee worked as a computer programmer at IBM from 1962 to 1965. He later worked for the International Computers Limited in Bracknell, Berkshire. During this period he was awarded with a Master of Arts degree from the University of Cape Town for a dissertation on the novels of Ford Max Ford. He later received a PhD in Linguistics in 1969 from the University of Texas with thesis topic on the computer stylistic analysis of the works of Samuel Beckett. He taught En...

Title: In the Heart of the Country Author: J.M. Coetzee Genre: Novel (Dystopian, Lust, Murder) Publishers: Vintage Pages: 151 Year of First Publication: 1977 (this edition, 2004) Country: South Africa "Today my father brought home his new bride." This is the sentence that set the novel, In the Heart of the Country, in motion and around which every deed in the novel revolves. Set in one of South Africa's remote farming communities, the novel, written in the first person's narrative style and in the present tense and set in the form of journal entries with numbered paragraphs, tells the story of how an old and psychotic virgin, Magda, killed her father and her father's black mistress, Klein-Anna, whom she describes as the new bride, but who in actuality was the wife of Magda's father's servant, Hendrik. In the novel, Magda writes of killing her father in two very different scenarios. In the first scenario, she kills her father together with ...

Title: Dusklands Author J.M. Coetzee Publishers: Vintage Genre: Novella Pages: 125 Year: First Published 1974 (this edition, 2004) Country: South Africa/Australia This is my first reading of a Nobel Prize Winner and I wasn't disappointed. Duskland consist of two novelettes: The Vietnam Project and The Narrative of Jacobus Coetzee. THE VIETNAM PROJECT: This novelette was written or narrated in the first person and set during the Vietnam war. A psychologist Eugene Dawn developed a novel psychological war strategy to be used to win the remaining phases of the war. Having been asked by his supervisor, Coetzee, to revise his propaganda, Eugene criticised himself so much that he was overtaken by the stress of the work and finally ceded to a mental breakdown. It is an interesting novelette and shows that the casualties of war are not only those whose bones fill the belly of the earth but include those whose mental constitution succumbs to the stress of war...