Dusklands

"J.M. Coetzee's vision goes to the nerve center of being."—Nadine Gordimer J.M. Coetzee's latest novel, The Schooldays of Jesus, is now available from Viking. Late Essays: 2006-2017 will be available January 2018. A shattering pair of novellas in the tradition of Conrad's Heart of Darkness, Dusklands probes the links between the powerful and the powerless. "Vietnam Project" is narrated by a researcher investigating the effectiveness of United States propaganda and psychological warfare in Vietnam. The question of power is also explored in "The Narrative of Jacobus Coetzee," the story of an eighteenth-century Boer frontiersman who vows revenge on the Hottentot natives because they have failed to treat him with the respect that he thinks a white man deserves. With striking intensity, J. M. Coetzee penetrates the twilight land of obsession, charting the nature on colonization as it seeks, in 1970 as in 1760, to absorb the wilds into the Western dusklands. J. M. Coetzee's first published fiction includes two novellas. *The Vietnam Project* is a five–part, first–person story of a mythographer (mythmaker) working for the United States Department of Defense whose job is to write an essay for his overseer Coetzee detailing psychological colonization strategies to deploy against the Vietnamese during the early 1970s. At the other end is *The Narrative of Jacobus Coetzee,* author Coetzee's "integral" translation from Afrikaans of a Boer settler and six Hottentot servants' elephant–hunting expedition in 1760 and their contact with the Namaqua people. The latter is also written in the first person. Together, both narratives share a dialogue about the affected colonizer in the process of colonization, the (re)writing of history, the ethics of captivity, and relationship between the writer and the written, namely author Coetzee's grappling with the idea of complicity. On the whole, *Dusklands* is a fierce debut that demands close reading and intellectual reckoning. A megalomaniac Boer frontiersman wreaks hideous vengeance on a Hottentot tribe for undermining the 'natural' order of his universe with their anarchic rival order, mocking him and subjecting him to the humiliations of his own all too palpable flesh. A specialist in psychological warfare is driven to breakdown and madness by the stresses of a project of macabre ingenuity to win the war in Vietnam. Both the 18th-century Jacobus Coetzee and the 20th-century Eugene Dawn are in the business of pushing back the frontiers of knowledge and are dealers in death who denounce their own humanity and spurn their feelings of guilt. In these two narratives, Coetzee has crystallized in their absurdity and horror the extremes of scientific evangelism and heroic exploration. Overview: Dusklands (1974) is the first novel by J. M. Coetzee, winner of the 2003 Nobel Prize in Literature. It is a presentation and critique of the violence inherent in the colonialist and imperialist mentality of the Western world.