Ellena Savage in the Sydney Review of Books:
In ‘As a Woman Grows Older’, the second story in J.M. Coetzee’s very funny 2023 book The Pole and Other Stories, Elizabeth Costello complains to her son John:
‘The word that comes back to me from all quarters is bleak. Her message to the world is unremittingly bleak. What does it mean, bleak? A word that belongs to a winter landscape has somehow become attached to me, like a little mongrel that trails behind, yapping, won’t be shaken off. I am dogged by it. It will follow me to the grave. It will stand at the lip of the grave, peering in and yapping bleak, bleak, bleak!’
When I told friends I was rereading Coetzee’s novels for a review of his new book, their responses fell into two categories. The first was a variation of ‘bleak!’, and the second was ‘I once thought about writing a PhD on him’ – another version of bleak. Only those in the second category admitted they sometimes found Coetzee ‘funny’, and even then, only some of them did. When I typed ‘bleak’ and ‘J. M. Coetzee’ into my search bar, the results confirmed the diagnosis: ‘Frighteningly bleak,’ says the New Statesman; his works ‘mirror the bleakness of the human condition’ – the New York Times. In The Guardian, Coetzee’s vision explores ‘the human condition with a bleak, dispassionate sympathy’. ‘I do have some difficulty with the bleak emotional weather of his autobiographical works,’ says the London Review of Books. Furthermore: ‘bleak’ (Salon); ‘bleak’ (British Council); ‘bleak’ (Prospect Magazine).
More here.