Where to start with J.M. Coetzee: a guide to his best fiction

South African-born novelist J.M. Coetzee is one of the most dazzling stars in the Booker Prize library: he has been nominated six times (only Salman Rushdie has had more nominations), won twice (in 1983 for Life & Times of Michael K, and in 1999 for Disgrace) – and is one of only five Booker winners to also have won the Nobel Prize in Literature (alongside Nadine Gordimer, Kazuo Ishiguro, William Golding and  V.S. Naipaul). 

His status is indisputable: Coetzee is often named one of the greatest living writers in English. He is a serious artist, whose standing has been reached despite his reluctance to publicise or explain his work. (He didn’t attend the Booker Prize ceremony in either of his winning years, though he has acknowledged it as ‘the ultimate prize to win in the English-speaking world’).

For the last half-century, since his debut novel Dusklands in 1974, Coetzee has published a new novel every three or so years, reliably, regularly or – one might say, given the intensity of his vision – relentlessly. But this means that there are now 19 books of his fiction to choose from. If you’re new to Coetzee, here’s where we think you should start.

Coetzee’s first Booker Prize-winning novel, Life & Times of Michael K (1983), arrived like a comet blazing across the sky. Nothing had prepared us for the power of this story about a man whose life and times are thwarted at every turn, first by his mother’s dependence on him, and later by his submission to authority figures in a South Africa that feels as much allegorical as historical. (It’s no coincidence that the hero is referred to throughout by the Kafkaesque name of K.) This is a book that should be hopelessly gloomy, so it’s a tribute to Coetzee’s storytelling efficiency (‘Because of his face K did not have women friends,’ goes one typically blunt sentence) that the novel is irresistibly readable. And the hero, Michael K, is drawn with such compassion – his spirit never dimmed by setbacks, his humanity clear on every page – that the book in the end feels like a celebration of life: even the sort of life none of us would wish to live.

His second winner, the celebrated Disgrace (1999), is a book of themes relevant to our times and of an artfulness that is timeless. David Lurie, a university professor in Cape Town, becomes the foolish author of his own misfortune when he sleeps with one of his students – ‘a last leap of the flame of sense before it goes out’ – which leads to a downfall, which in turn escalates further and further, burying him in shame and disgrace and carrying innocent people along with him. The story is an urgent page-turner, and Coetzee’s control and care are astonishing – it is a lean tale with not a spare word; every sentence moves us on, in terms of story or understanding. (In theory, every sentence in every book should be like this, but it is a rare achievement.) Disgrace treats readers with the respect of dealing in difficult topics – race, rape, abuse of power – in a complex way, allowing us space to decide for ourselves. It is, as Virginia Woolf said of Middlemarch, a novel written for grown-ups.

Early in his career, Coetzee was irresistibly drawn to write about South Africa even as he was attempting to escape it (‘What an uninspiring name for a country!’ says Elizabeth in Age of Iron) – first to England, then to America, and finally to Australia, where he has lived since 2003. Leaving his homeland has been a vital release for Coetzee’s writing, allowing him to expand in both subject matter and style.

Between 2013 and 2019 Coetzee published a trilogy of novels that were set everywhere, and nowhere. The Childhood of Jesus (2013), The Schooldays of Jesus (2016, longlisted for the Booker Prize) and The Death of Jesus (2019) describe the lives of a boy, David, and a man, Símon, who are immigrants to a Spanish-speaking city, Novilla, where they have no memory of the past. Símon becomes a father figure to David, and they – together with a woman they think might be David’s mother – navigate family life. Nobody in Novilla seems to care about the wider world: David asks a colleague why there is no news on the radio of ‘what is going on in the world’. ‘Oh,’ replies the colleague, ‘is something going on?’

The books are filled with the terrors and joys of parenthood, and the mysteries of life – education, sex, work – from the viewpoint of a child. And they are full of mystery for the reader too – are the novels allegorical, and if so for what? The Bible? Life after death? Refugee status? Coetzee desired this mystery: he wanted the first book in the trilogy to be published with a blank cover and title page, ‘so that only after the last page had been reached would the reader meet the title, namely The Childhood of Jesus’. Some critics derided the lack of guidance. ‘A novel is not a crossword puzzle,’ said one.

But in my view the Jesus trilogy is a late masterpiece, which gives all the intelligence, energy, elegance and insight we expect of Coetzee in pure form, unburdened by the associations a reader would inevitably make with a real-world setting. ‘Why he is here,’ Símon reflects in the book, ‘he will discover in the process of being here.’ (Or as Coetzee put it when reading from the first volume, ‘A little obscurity never did anyone any harm.’) The trilogy is action-packed, at once dense and light, and in the final volume – which reminds us that we are always saying goodbye to our children – devastating enough to move the most stoic reader to tears.

We don’t associate Coetzee with love stories. His books, surely, are too hard and cold. Of course, he saw this charge coming and headed it off. In Youth, he considers himself ‘not fiery enough, not passionate’. In Summertime, his writing is described by one character as ‘too cool, too neat. Too lacking in passion’. But, always ready to surprise us, Coetzee in his latest book has produced a love story. The novella The Pole (2023) is about a woman, Beatriz, who finds herself the object of infatuation by a famous Polish pianist – which she goes along with, mainly because she cannot understand why. The consequences of the love affair are both absurd and touching.

Beatriz asks herself questions (‘What does it say about her that the man expects she will respond?’), as all Coetzee’s characters ask themselves questions. Just as Philip Roth once had to take his typewriter in to be repaired because he had worn down the letter ‘I’, so Coetzee must be running out of question marks. His characters are endlessly curious about their place in the world, the motivations of others – and themselves – and why things must be the way they are. They rarely find answers, but their questions help us know what they want, and what we need to ask ourselves in turn. 

The Pole also exhibits the lightness that writers often turn to in their late work – think of the final books of writers like Graham Greene and Saul Bellow. The books become less dense and more direct, better able to hit the reader directly, a concentrated shot of the themes that have occupied the author through their life – and this makes these books, including The Pole, a particularly good place to start.

One curiosity of Coetzee’s late work is that his most recent books, The Death of Jesus and The Pole, were published in Spanish translation first – which might seem a curious move for a master of the English language. It is a conscious policy on his part: ‘I do not like the way in which English is taking over the world,’ he said. ‘I do what little I can to resist the hegemony of the English language.’ He chose to have his recent books published in Argentina – and also Australia – before the UK and the USA because ‘the symbolism of publishing in the South before the North is important to me.’ It’s a reminder that, even in his later works, Coetzee remains a political writer at heart.