. . . Like Kafka, Coetzee often sets his work in unspecified or unnamed locations, or else in the distant past or not-too-distant future." Avoiding the particulars of South Africa's regime of terror in most of his fiction, Coetzee has created tales with a more powerful, universal message.
Afrikaner by Name Only
John Michael Coetzee was born in Cape Town, South Africa, in 1940, the son of an Afrikaner father and an English mother. On his father's side he was descended from Dutch settlers who came to Africa in the seventeenth century, and on both sides he had grandparents who were farmers. During the Second World War, with his father away in the military, Coetzee, his younger brother, and his mother lived in a rented room in the town of Prince Albert. They were "surviving," as Coetzee wrote in his memoir, Boyhood: Scenes from Provincial Life, "on the six pounds a month his father remitted from the Government General's Distress Fund." Writing of himself in the third person, Coetzee continued: "Of Prince Albert he remembers only the whine of mosquitoes in the long hot nights, and his mother walking to and from in her petticoat, sweat standing out on her skin, her heavy, fleshy legs crisscrossed with varicose veins, trying to soothe his baby brother .
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