Age of iron

by J. M. Coetzee

Paper Book, 2018

Status

Available

Call number

823.914

Genres

General Fiction

All Topics

Fiction

Publication

London : Penguin Books, 2018.

Description

Nobel Laureate and two-time Booker prize-winning author of Disgrace and The Life and Times of Michael K, J. M. Coetzee tells the remarkable story of a nation gripped in brutal apartheid in his Sunday Express Book of the Year award-winner Age of Iron. In Cape Town, South Africa, an elderly classics professor writes a letter to her distant daughter, recounting the strange and disturbing events of her dying days. She has been opposed to the lies and the brutality of apartheid all her life, but now she finds herself coming face to face with its true horrors: the hounding by the police of her servant's son, the burning of a nearby black township, the murder by security forces of a teenage activist who seeks refuge in her house. Through it all, her only companion, the only person to whom she can confess her mounting anger and despair, is a homeless man who one day appears on her doorstep. In Age of Iron, J. M. Coetzee brings his searing insight and masterful control of language to bear on one of the darkest episodes of our times. 'Quite simply a magnificent and unforgettable work' Daily Telegraph 'A superbly realized novel whose truth cuts to the bone' The New York Times 'A remarkable work by a brilliant writer' Wall Street Journal South African author J. M. Coetzee was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2003 and was the first author to win the Booker Prize twice for his novels Disgrace and The Life and Times of Michael K. His novel, Foe, an exquisite reinvention of the story of Robinson Crusoe is also available in Penguin paperback.… (more)

User reviews

LibraryThing member m.gilbert

Post-war Austrian poet Ingeborg Bachmann writes in her poem “Always Among Words”:Between a word and a thingyou only encounter yourself,lying between eachas if next to someone ill,never being able to get to either,tasting a sound and a body,and relishing bothIn many ways, the female narrator in

J. M. Coetzee’s novel Age of Iron, an aging retired classics professor dying of breast cancer, expresses this problem of words and meaning, of speech and understanding. As she struggles throughout the novel to express her love for an absent daughter and her own outrage at the injustices of South Africa’s apartheid, she encounters anger, tragedy, and sorrow. Through her friendship with a vagrant named Mr. Verceuil, however, she affirms that the most meaningful connections are often those which remain ‘unspoken’ and require little use for words. This is a unique and rare place, however, and communication remains as necessary to life as food and shelter.Like the Magistrate in Waiting for the Barbarians, Mrs. Curren is a white South African awakening to her complicity to the apartheid system. She is also dying of cancer and alone, and her ambivalence towards her illness shapes her perception of the world and therefore, her narrative voice. The syntax is contradictory and often self-negating: “Death is the only truth left. Death is what I cannot bear to think…I am thinking of someone else, I am not thinking death, am not thinking the truth.”As Mrs. Curren writes, apartheid itself is breathing its last breath while maintaining its firm grip, but the fires of aggression and violence begin to kindle from the other side. Bheki, the teenage son of her housekeeper Florence, represents the future of the country’s black youth. Mrs. Curren, upset that Florence cannot control Bheki and his friends and their frequent waywardness, believes that Florence is neglecting her duties as a mother. Her housekeeper, on the other hand, remains silent and complies with their aggressive behavior. She recognizes their forthright actions as necessary and good for the future: “They are like iron, we are proud of them.”Terminally ill and with no one to talk to, she composes an epistle to a daughter in America who has moved to escape her own complicity in apartheid. But it is in Mrs. Curren’s relationship with Verceuil, whom she finds sleeping in a back alley, where she finds comfort and friendship. They are bound by a mutual sense of hopelessness, the need to endure, and their apparent impotence in a world that remains angry and destructive. His silent gestures and day-to-day survival are what lend a “real world” concreteness to her often abstract and philosophical meanderings: “Why do I write about him? Because he is and is not I. Because in the look he gives me I see myself in a way that can be written. Otherwise, what would this writing be but a kind of moaning, now high, now low? When I write about him, I write about myself…” Through him, she re-establishes life and survival as the focus of her every act and every word.Mrs. Curren’s struggle to live is thus defined by her efforts to express her complex love for her daughter, to make sense of her world, to speak the “truth” of how she feels and what she believes is right. But words have been sickened, or else silenced, by the events of a violent past and unrelenting cruelty; they have lost their meaning and their ability to be heard; actions, and not words, are now the language of this “age of iron”. When Bheki disappears, Mrs. Curren accompanies Florence to the township where she is met with hostility from its inhabitants. Though she appeals to the people of the township as a mother and as a human being, her words are ‘white’ and can no longer serve as a plea for compassion and understanding. Her words are the words of the ‘oppressor’: “This woman talks shit,’ said the man in the crowd. He looked around. ‘Shit,’” he said.What stands out most for me in the novel is this problem of communication: between mothers and daughters, the old and the young, the sick and the healthy, black South Africans and white South Africans. It is a familiar theme in Coetzee’s works. Apartheid has destroyed these relationships like a cancer from within. Questions remain about the future, and words are all one has to help achieve understanding and to shape attitudes and values. Ingeborg Bachmann, whose poem serves as a kind of epigraph to this review, wrote about this problem of words and their necessity to heal. She accounts for her own complicity in the horrors of Nazi Germany through her poetry, trying to restore trust through words and the use of fragmentary images. For Coetzee, I believe it is the same: the struggle to find the words is the struggle to live. We must keep looking for the words, they say, albeit in the refuse of a back alley or in the remains of a gray sand dune littered with ashes of homes burned to the ground.

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LibraryThing member whitewavedarling

J.M. Coetzee is slowly but surely becoming a favorite author of mine. Her prose is so carefully paced and lovingly based in detail that each book reads nearly as a collection of paintings and images as much as a novel. Her work is somewhat reminiscent of Michael Ondaatje's novels at times, and I

find that I'm consistently fascinated with the characters created in each tale--this was no exception.

In the course of what is primarily a single long letter to a far-away daughter, and a letter which the author sees as a goodbye, Coetzee here weaves a narrator based in a single woman's struggle to make peace with her own body's deterioration and her interaction with a reluctant set of companions. Each character is so carefully created as to be full and believable, even in the little dialogue that readers experience. About politics, about love, about struggle, and about the body's paths forward in an eclectic world, this novel is a quiet masterpiece well worth the time.

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LibraryThing member JuliaEllen

It's been a few years since I read this book, but I remember it as a pretty good read. Although, the ending is a bit ambiguous.

LibraryThing member shawnd

I didn't especially like this but kept on until the end. I found it quite preachy at times and a little expansive. I don't like novels where the lead character feels OK talking about his/her dreams. Quite boring. There is a tight compact story that someone writing simply (Hemingway?) could pull off

wonderfully, but this story is stretched almost to the maudlin. Much better if you are researching apartheid or cancer than just looking for a novel. This is not his best work, needless to say.

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LibraryThing member CarolynSchroeder

My first novel by this acclaimed author. It is disturbing on many levels, but honest. Follows a white woman dying of cancer and the African people around her. She slowly sees the horror before she dies; and reflects on her loneliness too. It does tend to ramble in sections, but beautifully written.

LibraryThing member CharlesSwann

This book represents not just a particular thing about South Africa after the cracking down of apartheid, it also represents general problems about lives we have to face in the course of our life time.

LibraryThing member mlbelize

Mrs. Curran is dying of cancer. Opposed all her life to the system of apartheid but sheltered from the realities of the cruelty imposed, she is now faced with results that the system has brought. As black townships are burnt, she faces the cancer that is killing her country, turning the souls of

the young to iron and ravaging her body. This is not a happy uplifting book but one that makes you think and examine life and injustice. Coetzee has become one of my favourite authors and I’ll certainly be reading more of his work in the future.

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LibraryThing member Litblog

A short and seemingly conventional novel, the more you think about the plot the stranger it is though.

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