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J. M. COETZEE'S fiction strips bare the veneer that protects us, and it ventures unflinchingly into territory of mind and experience most of us are afraid to face. Yet he writes with a sparseness and reticence that keep his work from being overtaxed or overwrought. He treats human pain and weakness with respect and refrains from judgment. At the same time, every work of his explores important sociopolitical issues and their psychological impact, and in every fictional act he reaches for the limits of human endurance. There are echoes of the classical in his novels: intimations of Kafka and Solzhenitsyn and Dostoevsky and Beckett, because of the way he fuses the intellectual and the psychological. Coetzee is a writer for our time who possesses the courage and the imagination and the skill to probe in fiction what needs to be explored, and he does so while maintaining readability and focus. Since his first novel, Coetzee has shown consistency, continuity, and sustainability and has won important literary prizes with almost every book he has published. For Coetzee to win the Neustadt Prize at this time would be to recognize a body of work that is important, thought-provoking, and of outstanding quality.
There are many reasons for recommending Coetzee for the Neustadt Prize. He is a writer of high caliber. His fiction is consistently strong and his prose sparse, though it conveys a world of possibilities in spite of the reserve with which he writes. The quality of restraint has been commented on by critics, who point out that, given Coetzee's subject matter (human pain, weakness, and torture-often shown in historical context), it would be unseemly to indulge in gratuitous description. The central issue in much of what he writes is what is often regarded as the fundamental problem of twentieth- and now twenty-first-century literature in general: how do we witness another's pain? The possibility that we might not be able to describe another's pain, even though we empathize with that person, is a conflict at the heart of every work of writing. Coetzee goes a long way in probing the need to connect on the level of how another person suffers, while acknowledging that one comes up short. Another reason for the widespread interest in Coetzee's...