Another tour de force by Coetzee. As in Slowman, Coetzee takes a man and strips him of all pretense while asking bare-boned, honest questions about our existence. A man who loses his job after an ill-fated affair with a student because he refuses to engage the religiously constructed language of his tribunal. Language makes no sense when his full acceptance of guilt is construed as obfuscation. This theme continues, shaped by the post-colonial South Africa, as he attempts to help his daughter living next to and among Africans with new rights. The gap runs parallel between the old and young, the Africans and whites: "It's not a country, this [playing off Yeat's poem] for old men." And Coetzee means it, does not shirk from the difficult task of facing the truth, as his narrator later explains (and could stand as a summation of the book): "By the time the big words come back reconstructed, purified, fit to be trusted once more, he will be long dead."
Rules by Cynthia Lord
