By Connie Nardini
Have you ever had a rich-looking three-layered chocolate cake and tried to decide how best to attack it? Should you eat one layer at a time? Or skip to the frosting, ignoring layerism? Reading J.M. Coetzee’s 2007 novel Diary Of a Bad Year, presents the same problems. Each page is in three layers.
The top one is a series of essays written by the hero – a Nobel laureate author – for publication in a book titled Strong Opinions. His opinions are indeed strong, often very funny, and often very alarming. Many of the essays opine about politics, often those of Australia, as the hero lives in Sydney.
On al-Qaeda, he says: “On television last night, a BBC documentary, which argues that, for reasons of its own, the U.S. administration (Bush) choose to keep alive the myth of al-Qaeda as a powerful secret organization with cells all over the world, whereas the truth is al-Qaeda has been more or less destroyed and what we see today are terror attacks by anonymous groups of Muslim radicals.
“I have no doubt that the main claims of the documentary are true . . . If there were a devilish organization . . . bent on . . . destroying Western civilization, it would surely by now poisoned water supplies all over the place, or shot down commercial aircraft, or spread noxious germs – acts of terrorism that are easy enough to bring off.
“Included in the programme was the story of four young American Muslims on trial for planning an attack on Disneyland. During the trail the prosecution included a home video found in their apartment . . . The video was exceedingly amateurish. It included long footage of a garbage can and of the photographer’s feet as he walked. The prosecution claimed that the amateurishness was feigned, that what we were witnessing was a renaissance tool: The garbage can was a potential hiding place for a bomb, the walking feet paced out the distance from A to B.
“The rationale offered by the prosecution for this paranoid interpretation was that the very amateurishness of the video was ground for suspicion, since, with al-Qaeda, nothing is what it seems to be.”
The author goes in to say that the American prosecutors thought this way because they were taught in the 1960s and 70s that suspicion was the best tool for analysis. He writes that George W., who imbibed this mothers’ milk of what makes morality, claims “he cannot commit a crime, since he is the one who makes the laws defining crimes.”
Sandwiched in the middle of the page is a running account of the author and his relationship with a very sexy neighbor in his apartment building who he meets in the laundry room. She was a “startling . . . apparition . . . because the tomato-red shift she wore was so startling in its brevity.” He manages to hire her to type up his strong opinions. Anya had “a derriere so perfect as to be angelic.”
I should mention that the sandwiching doesn’t really begin until page 25 when the reader is introduced to Anya’s thoughts, which make up the third layer of each page. We find that she knows “El Senior” lusts after her but she decides it is harmless and, after all, her due as the sexiest Filipino woman around. She lives with her boyfriend, Alan, who is a portend of the AIG wheeler-dealers we are now so familiar with.
So now we have all three layers – any one of which can extend beyond one page to two or three. How do you read them? I tried following one layer to its story end, then go back and do the same for the other two. Then I tried reading each page as one would normally do. Then I resorted to doing both – first reading a section from top to bottom and then rereading horizontally.
I found out an amazing thing; Coetzee has you living inside his two main characters and, at the same time, watching how they slowly but surely affect each other. The trick is to let go of old reading habits and join his game. It’s worth it.
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Previously in Connie’s Corner:
* “Heavier Than Air.” Nona Caspers creates a tapestry of small towns and chronicles the lives of people living there who have a hard time coming down to earth.
* “Pale Fire.” Nabokov creates a novel that doesn’t seem to have coherent plot but a story that contains a do-it-yourself kit.
* “Out Stealing Horses.” A coming-of-age story that reveals a father’s secret life during wartime.
* “An American In Iceland.” Answering the riddle: how many Icelanders does it take to change a light bulb?
* “The Physics of the Dalai Lama.” How Buddhism squares with quantum mechanics.
* “Finn.” Some kind of monster.
* “The Master Bedroom.” Betrayal, revelation, metaphor, and a swan in a dirty sheet.
* So Long, See You Tomorrow. The powerlessness of childhood and the untrustworthiness of adults.
Posted on March 30, 2009