Diary of Bad Year
J. M. Coetzee
Diary of a Bad Year is set in urban Australia and follows the odd relationship between Juan, a semi-retired author and Anya, a Filipino housewife. Coetzee analyses a series of 'opinions' by showing them in the light of both Anya and Anya's partner Andy, a wealthy Australian. Coetzee creates both a sexual tension and a mental tug of war between the two men as they fight to win over both Anya's body and mind.
The novel reads as three interwoven perspectives which are read through at the same time. At the top of each page is a series of opinion pieces written by Juan for a German magazine. In the middle section of the page the relationship between Juan and Anya is shown from Juan's perspective. The final section is dedicated to Anya's perspective on her changing relationships with both Juan and Alan. While the story lines are written in the present they are offset temporally from each other allowing each idea or opinion to be looked at from three different angles as you read through the novel. The opinion is introduced. The opinion is then read by and discussed by Juan and Anya. Anya then conveys the opinion to Andy who critiques it from an entirely different and generally dismissive perspective. To me, Anya represents the threshold between theory and practice, between the metaphysical and the physical. Coetzee laments the way ideas, particularly moral ideas, work perfectly in theory but cannot be translated into reality; something is lost in translation, either through language or human fallacy.
Two passages I really enjoyed were:
If I were pressed to give my brand of political thought a label, I would call it pessimistic anarchistic quietism . . ; anarchism because experience tells me what is wrong with politic is power itself; quietism because I have my doubts about the will to set about changing the world, a will infected with the drive to power; and pessimism because I am sceptical that, in a fundamental way, things can be changed. (Pessimism of this kind is cousin and perhaps even sister to belief in original sin, that is, to the conviction that humankind is imperfectible.)
I approve of children in the abstract. Children are our future. It is good for old people to be around children, it lifts our spirits. And so forth.
What I forget about children is the unending racket they make. Badly put, they shout. Shouting is not simply talking writ loud and large. It is not a means of communication at all, but a way of drowning out rivals. It is a form of self-assertion, one of the purest there is, easy to practice and highly effective. A four-year-old may not be a s strong as a grown man, but he is certainly louder.
One of the things we should learn along the road toward being civilised; not to shout.
While Anya eventually leaves Alan she does not fall for Juan. She loves the idea of Juan and wishes to remain friends but the impossibility of their union is made starkly clear. She was only entertaining him 'a lonely man' in need of company. Anya is the world, the world is good, but it doesn't care for high and mighty moral theory.
