Disgrace

I recently finished reading Disgrace, the book that won J.M. Coetzee his then-unprecedented second Booker Prize (Australian Peter Carey later matched it). I wept when I read the last page. It's been a while since a novel has made me cry.

Disgrace is the story of a man who loses everything: his youth, his reputation, his academic career, and ultimately, much more. His downfall begins with an ill advised affair. He gives in to his passion, and later is unable to criticize it (or censure himself) simply because he is past his prime. After he leaves the University, he goes to live with his beloved daughter, who has a farm in the Eastern Cape. There he suffers a worse abasement. He and his relationship with his daughter are forever changed.

It reminded me of another novel I read earlier this year, Philip Roth's The Human Stain. The main characters are aging academics who suffer public humiliation, to which they respond with indignation. There are official inquiries, and early retirement. Other shared themes include race, sex with younger women, and university politics.

Also common to the two novels is the writers' unflagging honesty. There is no shirking, for example, from the banal indignity of physical aging. Coetzee and Roth are master craftsmen at the top of their games.

Thanks, Lore.

Lost in Translation

When I left for Turkey, I was 2/3 of the way into Murakami's running book, which I had borrowed from the library. I didn't fancy lugging it around for two weeks, so rather than renewing it and letting it sit at home unused, I returned it. Today I went to the library, found a copy of the English translation, and sat down to finish it off.

The translation was awful: the narrative voice is off and the prose is poor. (It read like something I might produce.) There is a manner of vagueness (for lack of a better expression) that is perfectly acceptable in Japanese, but which, when rendered artlessly into English, is perfectly abominable. This was extensively detailed in Goeff Dyer's review in the NY Times:

On Page 25 he tells us that the “kind of” jazz club he used to run was “pretty rare” and served “pretty decent food” and that he was “pretty naïve.” Moving on, we learn that he was “pretty surprised” when his first novel was “fairly well received,” that his Cambridge apartment was “pretty noisy,” that his new running shoes have been “pretty well” broken in, that he is “pretty easygoing” and had “a pretty good feeling for the pace” he would need to maintain in the New York marathon.

Ugh. Dyer dryly remarks that Murakami's is "the type of prose I would call sort of pretty poor." He goes on to say that "Either he’s the kind of writer who’s a pretty poor editor of his own stuff or this kind of lazy repetition is deliberate." I don't recall getting that impression while reading the original (Japanese) version, but it's possible that I'm less discerning when reading in my second language.