Reason and Its Others in Coetzee's Jesus Novels

The trajectory of J. M. Coetzee's career as a novelist—some would say the foremost novelist writing in English over the past forty years—is not a straightforward one. Beginning with two works uncompromisingly in the modernist tradition, the disparate pair of novellas titled Dusklands (1974) and the numbered paragraphs of In the Heart of the Country (1977), he shifted to a more accessible style, and achieved international recognition, with Waiting for the Barbarians (1980). There followed a series of novels each of which marked a new direction: Life & Times of Michael K (1983) is set in an imaginary near future and Foe (1986) in an equally imaginary eighteenth century; Age of Iron (1990) takes the form of an impossible letter; The Master of Petersburg (1994) presents a fictional episode in the life of Fyodor Dostoevsky. Only with Disgrace (1999) did Coetzee undertake a novel that, although not without its opacities,...