Stranger Shores: Literary Essays

Two-time Booker Prize-winner J. M. Coetzee is one of the world's greatest novelists. This thought-provoking collection gathers twenty-six of his essays on books and writing. In his opening piece, "What Is a Classic?", Coetzee asks, "What does it mean in living terms to say that the classic is what survives?" He explores the answer by way of T. S. Eliot, Johann Sebastian Bach, and Zbigniew Herbert. Coetzee goes on to discuss eighteenth- and nineteenth-century authors such as Defoe and Turgenev, the German modernists such as Rilke, Kafka, and Musil, and the giants of late-twentieth-century literature, among them Brodsky, Gordimer, Rushdie, and Lessing.

First essay, "What is a Classic", and the second, on Robert Louis Stevenson, are great. I also enjoyed the essays on Musil's Diaries, Dostoevsky and his biographer Joseph Frank, and Joseph Brodsky's essay collection "Less Than One". The rest are essentially book reviews, or commentary on South Africa, and were of lesser interest.

Coetzee writes intelligently with a clear and clean style, especially in his nonfiction, and it is a pleasure to read.

This is a collection of literary essays worthwhile both for their breadth and depth. From the first essay discussing the question: What is a Classic?; on to essays on authors from Defoe to Musil and Richardson to Rilke to Rushdie the collection seems eclectic. The essays are uniformly interesting and provide insights into authors I have not read as well as those I have.