First I will clarify that I read for pleasure.

My first impression was that it was “literary snobbery” i.e. if you don’t ‘get-it’ then you are intellectually deficient. The format of the book written in three views initially was very difficult particularly as they did not conclude at the same place in time. However with a bit of practice it actually worked. After all different individuals have different perspectives and sense of beginning and ending of life’s “moments” so what initially was frustrating became novel which in term became relevant.

The title is what initially induced me to pick it up however I didn’t feel it reflected the book’s content. After my initial trepidation, with persistence I actually enjoyed the book although I wouldn’t cite it as a “great read”. ( )

i liked the idea of the title - a diary of a bad year - and that was why i bought the book. yet it seems that the content of the novel spans a few weeks; 5 weeks at the most is my feeling. coetzee's narrator is himself - j.m. coetzee from south africa, a very celebrated author. reading the book was a strange experience; i was constantly confusing the two perspectives - those of coetzee-in-the-book and coetzee-writing-the-book. ultimately, i wasn't satisfied. both are such great writers. and there is a great deal of commentary on the writing process; obviously something that preoccupies authors all the time, but it was so self-conscious, that i felt i *had* to think about how the novel was written to get to a conclusion about the book. so, i wasn't very convinced by the character of alan, he seemed too easy to pin down and too easy to dislike. unless of course, coetzee is trying to point how biased a narrator can be, how untrustworthy, and how in this post-modern world it's really all up to the reader to figure out. far-fetched? i think not.
i enjoyed the simultaneity of the three perspectives, but was a little irritated by how deliberately they were physically separated.
still, i think this book will stay with me for sometime. sometimes all it takes is an evening, a dinner..everything is fragile. everything can unravel at any moment. it's coincidence when it doesn't happen. ( )

What effect does a Nobel Prize have on a novelist? I have no idea. But it has a pernicious, pervasive, clinging effect on a reader. I try to forget it, but it seeps into my thinking. A number of times Coetzee goes on too long -- he lets his alter-ego in the book pontificate, partly for novelistic effect, and partly because he can't help it -- and then I think: does the Nobel, and everything that goes with it, create an atmosphere in which he feels justified in taking any liberties? Other times the clever pagination of the book doesn't quite work out -- a dozen or so instances, the sentences don't end on the page, but flow on to the next, compelling the reader to read across pages instead of down the page -- and then I wonder: does the Nobel, and everything that goes with it, give Coetzee the sense that things like that need not matter, that they will be eclipsed and forgotten by the force of the concept? The Nobel (by which I mean the steady warmth of adulation and writers' appearances and awards) has this effect: it cushions the writer, so it seems, and it makes it that much harder for a reader trying to gauge what is measured and intended and what is simply permitted.

But that is not my principal objection to this book. Its crucial problem, to my mind, is the quality of the disquisitions that the narrator permits himself. As the other reviews point out, the narrator goes on at length about his opinions. In the logic of the novel, those opinions are being prepared for publication, so that is their immediate excuse for being in the novel. And Coetzee himself criticizes his own opinions, both in the voice of the principal female character and in the voice of that character's partner. At one point, he even uses his own voice -- the voice of the person who writes the opinions -- to criticize the opinions. But none of those criticisms is enough.

The problem with many of the opinions is not that they are harsh and inhuman (as the female character says), or that they are ineffective (as the male character says). It is that they are ill-informed and ill-argued. Coetzee is just not as interesting a thinker as, say, Musil, or Rochefoucauld, or Chamfort, or Lichtenberg, or Badelaire, or Brecht, or Broch, or any number of others. His opinions, mostly, are not interesting. And they are frequently ill-informed. Coetzee needs to read more about numbers and statistics (one of his topics), and more about theories of capitalism and democracy. He comes across as the kind of person who writes in to a newspaper of magazine, and doesn't know the subject as well as he should. I am not criticizing his ideas because they are radical: I am criticizing them because they are not radical enough. In "Disgrace," he had one absolutely stunning idea -- that animals could be as important as people, or more important. Here there are few such interesting ideas.

For me this is exemplified by a passage on page 203, where the narrator, in the course of writing one of his "opinions," one titled "On having thoughts," says: "But do I really qualify as a thinker at all, someone who has what can properly be called thoughts, about politics or about anything else?" And he answers: "I have never been easy with abstractions or good at abstract thought." Let me suggest that Coetzee is fooling himself here. The shortcomings of his "opinions" are not related to a skill at abstract thinking: that's a red herring. His "opinions" are limited by what he knows, and by a lack of original thinking. "Elizabeth Costello" was translarently a mouthpiece for Coetzee's opinions, and it was the kind of book that someone who is not feted, who is not a Nobel laureate, would not have been allowed to write; his editor would have stopped him, and said something like this:

"Coetzee, you need to realize that your characters' opinions need to be allowed to become truly monomaniacal, really nuts, dangerously obsessive, intentionally boring -- otherwise they will appear to be what they really are, the very serious opinions of the author, whose only thought is to broadcast them to the world. It is your lack of understanding of the uninteresting nature of those opinions -- bolstered, I know, by the many people who continuously take them seriously, and praise you for them -- that makes them intractable as materials for a fully imagined fictional setting. A reader knows that they are not under your control: you think of them too highly, too primly, to seriously. Let them risk dying a natural death: put them at the mercy of the fiction, not the other way around."

I do not know if I will read another Coetzee novel. ( )

An old writer is commissioned to write a series of opinions for a German publication. He hires a hot little typist, hot being a young, sexy, female from the same apartment building. This young typist, though living with a loser Australian 'Warren Buffet' wannabe, is not dumb. And this is where the story, or stories, take off.

Each page is divided into three sections and the story is told from the perspective of each character. I started by reading each page from top to bottom then switched to reading the opinion or essay piece of each chapter, then flipping back to catch up on the typist and writer's relationship, and then flipping back yet again to read about the relationship between the typist and her lover idiot. Sounds tedious and frustrating, but it's really not. The sections are generally only 2 to 3 pages long. The connections of the three separate narratives are sometimes subtle, follow slightly different time lines, and weave together beautifully to create a new way of telling a story.

What I found interesting is how the old writer's opinions were slowly influenced by the opinions of the young typist. The interactions between these two became an enriching influence to each live. The Australian 'Warren Buffet' wannabe remained a loser throughout the book.

Thanks to the final opinion, I now feel compelled to read Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov, and soon. ( )

Certainly not Coetzee's best! ( )