Дж. М. Кутзее — библиография

Автор “Молодости” - южно-африканский писатель, лауреат Нобелевской премии Джон Майкл Кутзее - обращается к теме одновременно и довольно специальной, и вечной, во всяком случае, пока существует литература: “портрет художника в юности”. Одержимость жизненной сверхзадачей и сомнения в своих силах, гордыня пополам с робостью, первые любовные опыты, ревностное и ревнивое чтение, бедность и случайные заработки, отвлекающие от дела всей жизни… Уроженец ЮАР, Джон, поспешно покидает родину. Мечта всякого начинающего художника - попасть в Европу с ее культурой - осуществляется даже стремительней, чем можно было ожидать: герой спасается бегством из…

Джон Максвелл Кутзее родился в Южной Африке, работал в Англии и США, живет в Австралии. Дважды лауреат Букера и лауреат Нобелевской премии по литературе, он не явился ни на одну церемонию вручения, почти не дает интервью и живет, можно сказать, затворником. О своем творчестве он говорит редко, а о себе самом — практически никогда. Тем уникальнее «автобиографическая» трилогия «Сцены из жизни провинциала», полная эпизодов шокирующей откровенности, — «перед читателем складывается подробнейший, без прикрас, мозаичный портрет творца, стремящегося только к тому, чего достичь нелегко. Далеко не все факты совпадают с тем, что мы знаем о биографии реального Кутзее, но тем интереснее возникающий стереоэффект» (The Seattle Times). От детства в южноафриканской глубинке, через юность в кейптаунском университете и холодном Лондоне к «летнему времени» зрелости — мы видим Кутзее (или «Кутзее») так близко, как не видели никогда: «автопортрет бескомпромиссно исповедальный и в то же время замысловато зыбкий» (The New York Review of Books). Трилогия выходит в переводе Сергея Ильина (1948–2017) — знаменитого интерпретатора произведений Владимира Набокова и Джозефа Хеллера, Т. Х. Уайта и Мервина Пика, Стивена Фрая, Мишеля Фейбера и многих других современных классиков. Перевод был подготовлен еще в 2011 году, но публикуется впервые.

David is the small boy who is always asking questions. Simon and Ines take care of him in their new town, Estrella. He is learning the language, he has begun to make friends and he has the big dog Bolivar to watch over him.
But he'll be seven soon and he should be at school. And so, David is enrolled in the Academy of Dance. It's here, in his new golden dancing slippers, that he learns how to call down the numbers from the sky. Yet it's here too that he will make troubling discoveries about what adults are capable of.
The Schooldays of Jesus is a mesmerising tale about growing up, and about the choices we are forced to make in our lives.

An eminent, ageing Australian writer is invited to contribute to a book entitled Strong Opinions. For him, troubled by Australia's complicity in the wars in the Middle East,it is a chance to air some urgent concerns: how should a citizen of a modern democracy react to their state's involvement in an immoral war on terror, a war that involves the use of torture?
Then in the laundry room of his apartment block he encounters an alluring young woman. He offers her work typing up his manuscript. Anya is not interested in politics, but the job will be a welcome distraction, as will the writer's evident attraction towards her. Her boyfriend, Alan, is an investment consultant who understands the world in harsh economic terms. Suspicious of his trophy girlfriend's new pastime, Alan begins to formulate a plan...

A megalomaniac Boer frontiersman wreaks hideous vengeance on a Hottentot tribe for undermining the 'natural' order of his universe with their anarchic rival order, mocking him and subjecting him to the humiliations of his own all too palpable flesh. A specialist in psychological warfare is driven to breakdown and madness by the stresses of a project of macabre ingenuity to win the war in Vietnam. Both the 18th-century Jacobus Coetzee and the 20th-century Eugene Dawn are in the business of pushing back the frontiers of knowledge and are dealers in death who denounce their own humanity and spurn their feelings of guilt. In these two narratives, Coetzee has crystallized in their absurdity and horror the extremes of scientific evangelism and heroic exploration.

Elizabeth Costello is an Australian writer of international renown. Famous principally for an early novel that established her reputation, she has reached the stage where her remaining function is to be venerated and applauded.
Her life has become a series of engagements in sterile conference rooms throughout the world - a private consciousness obliged to reveal itself to a curious public: the presentation of a major award at an American college where she is required to deliver a lecture; a sojourn as the writer in residence on a cruise liner; a visit to her sister, a missionary in Africa, who is receiving an honorary degree, an occasion which both recognise as the final opportunity for effecting some form of reconciliation; and a disquieting appearance at a writers' conference in Amsterdam where she finds the subject of her talk unexpectedly amongst the audience.
She has made her life's work the study of other people yet now it is she who is the object of scrutiny. But, for her, what matters is the continuing search for a means of articulating her vision and the verdict of future generations.

Youth's narrator, a student in 1950s South Africa, has long been plotting an escape from his native country. Studying mathematics, reading poetry, saving money, he tries to ensure that when he arrives in the real world he will be prepared to experience life to its full intensity, and transform it into art. Arriving at last in London, however, he finds neither poetry nor romance. Instead he succumbs to the monotony of life as a computer programmer, from which random, loveless affairs offer no relief. Devoid of inspiration, he stops writing and begins a dark pilgrimage in which he is continually tested and continually found wanting.
Set against the background of the 1960s, Youth is a remarkable portrait of a consciousness turning in on itself. J. M. Coetzee explores a young man's struggle to find his way in the world with tenderness and a fierce clarity.

After crossing oceans, a man and a boy - both strangers to each other - arrive in a new land. David, the boy, has lost his mother and Simon vows to look after him. In this strange country they are each assigned a new name, a new birthday, a new life.
Knowing nothing of their surroundings, nor the language or customs, they are determined to find David's mother. Though the boy has no memory of her, Simon is certain he will recognise her at first sight. 'But after we find her,' David asks, 'what are we here for?'
The Childhood of Jesus is a profound, beautiful and continually surprising novel from a very great writer.

In a South Africa torn by civil war, Michael K sets out to take his mother back to her rural home. On the way there she dies, leaving him alone in an anarchic world of brutal roving armies. Imprisoned, Michael is unable to bear confinement and escapes, determined to live with dignity. Life and Times of Michael K goes to the centre of human experience - the need for an interior, spiritual life, for some connections to the world in which we live, and for purity of vision.
'This is a truly astonishing novel... I finished Life & Times of Michael K in a state of elation, for all the misery and suffering it contains. I cannot recommend it highly enough' Evening Standard

Stifled by the torpor of colonial South Africa and trapped in a web of reciprocal oppression, a lonely sheep farmer seeks comfort in the arms of a black concubine. But when his embittered spinster daughter Magda feels shamed, this lurch across the racial divide marks the end of a tenuous feudal peace.
As she dreams madly of bloody revenge, Magda's consciousness starts to drift and the line between fact and the workings of her excited imagination becomes blurred. What follows is the fable of a woman's passionate, obsessed and violent response to an Africa that will not heed her.

In Boyhood, J. M. Coetzee revisits the South Africa of half a century ago, to write about his childhood and interior life. Boyhood's young narrator grew up in a small country town. With a father he imitated but could not respect, and a mother he both adored and resented, he picked his way through a world that refused to explain its rules, but whose rules he knew he must obey. Steering between these contradictions, Boyhood evokes the tensions, delights and terrors of childhood with startling, haunting immediacy. Coetzee examines his young self with the dispassionate curiosity of an explorer rediscovering his own early footprints, and the account of his progress is bright, hard and simply compelling.

Paul Rayment is on the threshold of a comfortable old age when a calamitous cycling accident results in the amputation of a leg. Humiliated, his body truncated, his life circumscribed, he turns away from his friends.
He hires a nurse named Marijana, with whom he has a European childhood in common: hers in Croatia, his in France. Tactfully and efficiently she ministers to his needs. But his feelings for her, and for her handsome teenage son, are complicated by the sudden arrival on his doorstep of the celebrated Australian novelist Elizabeth Costello, who threatens to take over the direction of his life and the affairs of his heart.

Simon and David - a tall ten-year-old - are in a new land, together with a woman named Ines. The small family have found a home in which David can thrive.
But David is spotted by Julio Fabricante, the director of a local orphanage, playing football with his friends. He shows unusual talent. When David announces that he wants to live with Julio and the children in his care, Simon and Ines are stunned. David is leaving them, and they can only love him and bear witness.
The Death of Jesus is the completion of an incomparable trilogy in which J. M. Coetzee explores the meaning of a world empty of memory but brimming with questions.

The modern classic from double Booker Prize winner J.M. Coetzee – soon to be a major film starring Mark Rylance, Robert Pattinson and Johnny Depp
For decades the Magistrate has run the affairs of a tiny frontier settlement, ignoring the impending war between the barbarians and the Empire, whose servant he is. But when the interrogation experts arrive, he is jolted into sympathy with the victims and into a quixotic act of rebellion which lands him in prison, branded as an enemy of the state. Waiting for the Barbarians is an allegory of oppressor and oppressed. Not just a man living through a crisis of conscience in an obscure place in remote times, the Magistrate is an analogue of all men living in complicity with regimes that ignore justice and decency.

Scenes from Provincial Life brings together, in one volume, J.M. Coetzee’s majestic trilogy of fictionalised memoir, Boyhood, Youth and Summertime
It opens in a small town in the South Africa of the 1940s. We meet a young boy who, at home, is ill at ease with his father and stifled by his mother’s unconditional love. At school he passes every test that is set for him, but he remains wary of his fellow pupils. Later, as a student of mathematics in Cape Town he prepares to escape to Europe and turn himself into an artist. Once in London, however, the reality is dispiriting. Decades on, an English biographer researches a book about the late writer, John Coetzee. As he interviews important figures in Coetzee’s life, a portrait emerges of an awkward outsider who – even after death – remains dogged by rumours.

A young English biographer is working on a book about the late writer, John Coetzee. He plans to focus on a period in the seventies when, the biographer senses, Coetzee was 'finding his feet as a writer'. He embarks on a series of interviews with people who were important to Coetzee - a married woman with whom he had an affair, his favourite cousin Margot, a Brazilian dancer whose daughter had English lessons with him, former friends and colleagues. Thus emerges a portrait of the young Coetzee as an awkward, bookish individual, regarded as an outsider within the family. His insistence on doing manual work, his long hair and beard, and rumours that he writes poetry evoke nothing but suspicion in the South Africa of the time.

In The Master of Petersburg J. M. Coetzee dares to imagine the life of Dostoevsky. Set in 1869, when Dostoevsky was summoned from Germany to St Petersburg by the sudden death of his stepson, this novel is at once a compelling mystery steeped in the atmosphere of pre-revolutionary Russia and a brilliant and courageous meditation on authority and rebellion, art and imagination. Dostoevsky is seen obsessively following his stepson's ghost, trying to ascertain whether he was a suicide or a murder victim and whether he loved or despised his stepfather.

David is the small boy who is always asking questions. Simon and Ines take care of him in their new town, Estrella. He is learning the language, he has begun to make friends and he has the big dog Bolivar to watch over him.
But he'll be seven soon and he should be at school. And so, David is enrolled in the Academy of Dance. It's here, in his new golden dancing slippers, that he learns how to call down the numbers from the sky. But it's here too that he will make troubling discoveries about what adults are capable of.
The Schooldays of Jesus is a mesmerising tale about growing up, and about the choices we are forced to make in our lives.