Age of Iron
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
I am falling, I think, I am falling: welcome sweet sleep. Then at the very edge of oblivion something looms up and pulls me back, something whose name can only be dread.
Mrs Curren, a Cape Town classics professor, is an opponent of the apartheid regime who has nonetheless been sheltered from its worst horrors. Now she is dying of cancer. In her final days she must confront the violence, chaos and injustice of her own society. Then Mr Vercueil, a homeless alcoholic, is found sleeping beside her garage. Who is he, and why has he come to her?
J. M. Coetzee was the first author to win the Booker Prize twice and was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2003. He lives in Adelaide.
‘A superbly realised novel whose truth cuts to the bone.’ New York Times
‘[Coetzee] is a consummate withholder, one of the great masters of the unsaid and the inexplicit.’ New York Review of Books
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Harsh, unflinching and powerful, Coetzee's ( Waiting for the Barbarians ) new novel is a cry of moral outrage at the legacy that apartheid has created in South Africa. In scenes of stunning ferocity, he depicts the unequal warfare waging between the two races, a conflict in which the balance of power is slowly shifting. An elderly woman's letters to her daughter in America make up the narrative. Near death from rapidly advancing cancer, Cape Town resident Mrs. Curren is a retired university professor and political liberal who has always considered herself a ``good person'' in deploring the government's obfuscatory and brutal policies, though she has been insulated from the barbarism they produce. When the teenage son of her housekeeper is murdered by the police and his activist friend is also shot by security forces, Mrs. Curren realizes that ``now my eyes are open and I can never close them again.'' The only person to whom she can communicate her anguished feelings of futility and waste is an alcoholic derelict whom she prevails on to be her messenger after her death, by mailing the packet of her letters to her daughter. In them she records the rising tide of militancy among young blacks; brave, defiant and vengeful, they are a generation whose hearts have turned to iron. His metaphors in service to a story that moves with the implacability of a nightmare, Coetzee's own urgent message has never been so cogently delivered.
