Girish's Reviews > Diary of a Bad Year

There are books that tell a story and there are books that are the story. This book belongs to the latter category - quite masterfully done by Mr.Coetzee with three parallel narratives. I read later than in the paperback version of the book - it runs as three frames!

A 70+ South African author with onset of Parkinsons is writing his new book in Australia. The commission is called "Strong Opinions" which will be published in German and the book talks about hugely political and hardline topics like On Terrorism and On Anarchism and On Pedophilia. In a parallel thread between the chapters, he meets a young woman who lives in the same apartment and takes her on as his typist.

You know how it is a general phenomenon that a hot headed man slowly gets his act right and his edges smoothened by the influence of a woman? What happens to a work of art by a lonely author spewing anger by the influence of a young woman who is not a lover or not all platonic?

In the words of the woman towards the end of the book "Your Strong opinions seem to have become soft opinions"

So

"Whether the citizen lives or dies is not a concern of the state. What matters to the state and its records is whether the citizen is alive or dead.”

becomes

"Perhaps certain qualities of feeling that found expression in music can be recorded by being notated on paper, have become so remote that we can no longer inhabit them as feelings, can get a grasp of them only after long training in the history and philosophy of music, the philosophical history of music, the history of music as a history of the feeling soul."

The only other character is her live-in boyfriend who is a crook and a boor making the author the easy 'hero' in the triangle. The book has a sense of autobiography, sense of an elective emotion that distinguishes it. I probably missed a few references, but the essays were brilliant!

An amazing achievement - even without the gimmicky plotline.