Dusklands

Rating:
Summary: Vietnamese and Hottentots
Review: Coetzee's 'Dusklands' is composed by two totally different stories: the first one about the Vietnamese war and the second one about the destruction of a Hottentot village by a Dutch explorer.
The small thematic link between the two is the violent intrusion of foreigners into national (tribal) territories and affairs.

The original treatment of the two stories is also completely different. The 'Vietnam Project' is a psychological analysis, while the South African story is an excerpt of a diary relating the facts.
The 'Vietnam project' portraits a US Ministry of defence employee who works on a psychological warfare project for Vietnam, while in fact he is against the war. This schizophrenic situation and his guilty feelings turn into a depression.
The diary relates the conflict between an explorer and a Hottentot village which leads to a sadistic extermination of the inhabitants.
Both stories seem to be influenced by Freudian psychology, and the last one more specifically by Freud's 'Totem und Tabu'.

The writing becomes sometimes a 'text' in the manner of the French 'nouveau roman', a disastrous literary movement influenced by such conceptual deliriums as structuralism and linguistics. The results were cold and empty novels without deep feelings or distinctive social reality, a mere playing with words and esoteric symbols.

Coetzee's stories are certainly a worth-while read, but they don't attain a general human level, like e.g. the political novels of Ismail Kadare. They stay more or less pasted to the treated themes.

Rating:
Summary: Bad debut
Review: Collection of two separate novels, being what it is, Coetzee's first published book, shouldn't stand high in your exceptations. Author himself hasn't yet built his narrative style which often lead to confusing storytelling, often misleading reader and leving him on not-so-firm-ground of bad litterature. When I say bad i mean that it is involuntarilly bad (and what, you can say, was written bad in ones own will?), though I must confess, Vietnamese project is intelectually provoking, but lacks well developd charater with justified action. You shouldn't start with Coetzee on this book

Rating:
Summary: get the hook, scrape this guy off...
Review: Some of the absolute worst, most pretentious, emptiest, and most ultimately worthless drivel I have ever read. Jorge Luis Borges, regardless of all the idolatry that's been heaped upon him, had a surprising number of misses, and maybe nothing much to say. But I'll grant that he had a few high spots. Not this guy. Very derivative and disappointing stuff...I'll go elsewhere for literary thrills.