Inner Workings: Literary Essays 2000-2005, by J. M. Coetzee. Random House, Australia, 2007. ISBN 9781 74166 8353. RRP $39.95
Of these 21 essays by the South African-born Nobel Prize winner, all but five appeared first in the New York Review of Books; of the remainder, all but one appeared as introductions to single texts or collections. The odd man out is a study of Arthur Miller’s screenplay for John Huston’s film The Misfits and this singular instance of toe-dipping is one of the shorter pieces that Coetzee produces as an instance of his recent forensic preoccupations.
As the book readily displays, the critic-writer’s devotion to a particular topic is not necessarily linked to the length of his analysis; still, he gives only teasing suggestions of what he finds interesting about the poems of Hugo Claus and his observations on Beckett’s fiction leave you thirsting for more – much more.
Admittedly, all three of the briefest essays – on Miller, Claus, and Beckett – were written to meet functions outside the NYRB format but their elliptical, inferential qualities leave you wanting amplification on many points. Towards the end of his introduction to Beckett’s short fiction, Coetzee makes reference to a philosophical line stretching from Descartes to Derrida which begs for explication; at the same time, he notes that the Irish-born writer began his career ‘as an uneasy Joycean and an even more uneasy Proustian". The first writer is an obvious and well-known influence, but a link with the prolix creator of A la recherche du temps perdu waits in vain for any elaboration.
Inner Workings falls into two fairly even halves. In the first, the authors treated are almost all central European; all belong to the 20th century. Coetzee examines well-known writers like Italo Svevo, Robert Musil, Paul Celan, Günter Grass and W. G. Sebald, shining his searchlight over their range of work, not just confining himself to the task at hand; rather than confine himself to a focused discussion of Musil’s The Confusions of Young Törless, Coetzee presents a compelling overview of the author’s life and other fiction which has the odd effect of inspiring research into Musil’s period rather than buying the text itself.
In fact, the European essays make for hard reading, chiefly because the writer’s detours – to describe social milieux, a writer’s peers or family, problems in translation, historical backdrops – dazzle in their demonstrations of Coetzee’s polymathic