Master of Petersburg - Softcover

Coetzee, J. M.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0749396326 ISBN 13: 9780749396329

Publisher: Random House, 1997

Synopsis

1999, Paperback, 250 pages

About this title

About the Author

Born in Cape Town, South Africa, on February 9, 1940, John Michael Coetzee studied first at Cape Town and later at the University of Texas at Austin, where he earned a Ph.D. degree in literature. In 1972 he returned to South Africa and joined the faculty of the University of Cape Town. His works of fiction include Dusklands, Waiting for the Barbarians, which won South Africa’s highest literary honor, the Central News Agency Literary Award, and the Life and Times of Michael K., for which Coetzee was awarded his first Booker Prize in 1983. He has also published a memoir, Boyhood: Scenes From a Provincial Life, and several essays collections. He has won many other literary prizes including the Lannan Award for Fiction, the Jerusalem Prize and The Irish Times International Fiction Prize. In 1999 he again won Britain’s prestigious Booker Prize for Disgrace, becoming the first author to win the award twice in its 31-year history. In 2003, Coetzee was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature.

From Kirkus Reviews

Depending on how readers take to literary conceits, Coetzee's new novel will be received as either a flash of fierce lightning or a rumble of unthreatening thunder. Coetzee (Age of Iron, 1990, etc.) nimbly plucks his premise from a fact--usually treated as incidental--of Fyodor Dostoevsky's life. The Russian novelist had a wastrel stepson, Pavel Alexandrovich Isaev, whom Coetzee imagines died in 1869 (he didn't). Suffering an affliction beyond grief, Fyodor travels to St. Petersburg and takes the room his son last occupied. It's in the home of the dour Anna Sergeyevna Kolenkina, the mother of quick-tongued Matryona. His intention is to reconcile himself to his loss by getting to the bottom of it. What he doesn't count on is learning that what he'd been told was a suicide may have been a murder. Among Pavel's papers, which are in the hands of officials, is a list of people to be assassinated. Pavel was possibly marked for death as part of People's Vengeance, a revolutionary group headed by the opportunistic Sergei Gennadevich Nechaev. As various Dostoevskian themes wink from the lines (the ruthlessness of oppressors, father-son rivalry, the nature of death, madness), the disoriented Fyodor finds himself enamored of Anna as well as caught in Sergei's subversive activities. Eventually, Fyodor is entangled in additional deaths--one on each side of the law--and as the novel reaches its denouement, he suffers a major disillusionment. Handed his stepson's papers, he learns that he loomed as a heavy in the boy's life. He also discovers that Pavel had scribbled crude short stories that could be remade into works of Dostoevskian art. What Coetzee is getting at is not news: Writers mine material from the complexities of their lives and, if necessary, step on toes, ``sell everyone,'' endure ``a life without honor.'' Boldly presumptuous, yet somehow precious. -- Copyright ©1994, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

About this edition

• Publisher: Random House
• Publication date: 1997
• ISBN 10: 0749396326
• ISBN 13: 9780749396329
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 250