J M Coetzee

Elizabeth COSTELLO is a quite famous Australian novelist -- her best known work is a feminist reinterpretation of James Joyce's Mrs. Bloom -- now getting on in life and more accustomed to traveling, lecturing and receiving prizes than to writing new novels. She is about to visit America, escorted by her son, to pick up quite a grand award, given by Altona College.

A noted 19th-Century Russian writer, living abroad, returns to Petersburg when he receives word of the mysterious death of his stepson, Pavel. Grief-stricken, he goes through the young man's trunk, inhaling the odor from his clothes as if to take possession of his ghost. He whispers "Pavel" repeatedly to himself.

If J.M. Coetzee hangs an icon over his writing desk, it must be a portrait of Erasmus, saint of skeptics. The author of "In Praise of Folly," an amiable forerunner of the Protestant Reformation, was censured by the pope for his forerunning and denounced by Luther for his amiability. "The king of Amphibians," Luther growled; and much later the French writer Georges Duhamel called him "The king of But."

* This Sunday: We look at the photographs of Roman Vishniac and Alter Kacyzne for an intimate view of life in Poland and Eastern Europe before World War II. In addition, Christopher Hitchens on the epic struggle to control Central Asia; Peter Gay on the life and times of Mozart; and Jonathan Levi on J.M. Coetzee's "Disgrace: A Novel."

J. M. Coetzee, whose novel "Age of Iron" takes the form of a white South African widow's letter to her daughter in America, has won Britain's richest fiction prize. South African actress Janet Suzman picked up the $39,000 Sunday Express Book of the Year award on Coetzee's behalf Monday at a literary luncheon. "Age of Iron" is the South African author's first book in four years. Coetzee won acclaim for his earlier novels "Waiting for the Barbarians" and "Life and Times of Michael K."

Richard Eder's excellent review of J. M. Coetzee's "Foe" rightly places its emphasis upon the ambiguous relationship between the artist and the reality which he can or cannot fashion into art, but there is one facet of this subject in Coetzee's novel that has a special meaning for those familiar with Daniel Defoe's fictions. Everyone knows of Robinson Crusoe (Coetzee's Cruso) and Friday, but who is the narrator, Susan Barton?