I’ve been wanting to read something by Coetzee since he won the Nobel Prize in 2003. I guess it took an open reading slot and a wander around the library to make it finally happen. This book is sparse in the way it’s told but incredibly nuanced at its heart. While the story is simply about an older professor who disgraces himself through a not-entirely-consensual relationship with a student, the threads tangle deep into the shifts of power in post-apartheid South Africa. While it didn’t feel that amazing to me in the midst of reading, elements keep unfolding as I think back on it.

I got this book when McSweeney’s had their big sale last year. I never read A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, and I never read this one even after I bought it. It happened that when I was unpacking my books, I was a week into a misguided mission to read Roland Barthes’ Image, Music, Text. I was thankful to give up on that, but while this book was easier to read, it wasn’t too enjoyable.

The story concerns two friends who start a week-long trip around the world to give away a bunch of money. Apparently this trip was motivated by the narrator Will’s overwhelming grief after their friend Jack died suddenly in a car accident, so it should be kind of emotional and touching. Unfortunately the two dudes are just assholes. And then there are the bad attempts at multilinear storytelling that fall hollowly flat. It’s strange because I think of Eggers as a pretty good writer from various non-book writings of his that I’ve read, but this story seems structurally flawed.

After finishing the book today, I started reading some reviews and commentary about it and find out that a later edition included a supplemental section from Will’s friend Hand that discounts many of the bigger parts of the story (including saying that Will made Jack up to deal with his mother’s death) and was retitled Sacrament. I downloaded just the extra Sacrament part on the McSweeney’s site but only managed to skim through it before getting annoyed at his claims of Will’s all-out fabrication of pieces of the story.

I don’t know if it’s just that I’ve read some books that I really loved lately, but this was so surprisingly disappointing. For some reason I just didn’t buy the unreliability of the narrator aspect of Hand’s addition to the story. Why should I believe any of it then?

While Lolita holds fort as Nabokov’s best known novel, Pale Fire rates vaguely higher on the 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die list. Comprised of a 999-line poem in four cantos by a (fictional) famous American poet, John Shade, as well as a foreword and extensive commentary by his friend, Professor Charles Kinbote, at times it reads very much like a scholarly examination of a poem. Luckily Kinbote has a — kind of egotistical — way of digressing. Because of this, the reader learns all about his fantastic country of Zembla (a European city located in the north, presumably near Russia) and its exiled king.

There are a lot of interpretations (totally spoilers) surrounding whether any of the fictional characters and places are “real” — in the metafictional sense. Which is kind of funny since Nabokov confirmed one theory in an interview in 1962 (cited in that Wikipedia section). It seemed like the clues were pretty obvious to me, though I missed pieces of it.