Vintage books Disgrace Кутзее Джон Максвелл

A young English biographer is working on a book about the late writer, John Coetzee. He plans to focus on a period in the seventies when, the biographer senses, Coetzee was 'finding his feet as a writer'. He embarks on a series of interviews with people who were important to Coetzee - a married woman with whom he had an affair, his favourite cousin Margot, a Brazilian dancer whose daughter had English lessons with him, former friends and colleagues. Thus emerges a portrait of the young Coetzee as an awkward, bookish individual, regarded as an outsider within the family. His insistence on doing manual work, his long hair and beard, and rumours that he writes poetry evoke nothing but suspicion in the South Africa of the time

Youth's narrator, a student in 1950s South Africa, has long been plotting an escape from his native country. Studying mathematics, reading poetry, saving money, he tries to ensure that when he arrives in the real world he will be prepared to experience life to its full intensity, and transform it into art. Arriving at last in London, however, he finds neither poetry nor romance. Instead he succumbs to the monotony of life as a computer programmer, from which random, loveless affairs offer no relief. Devoid of inspiration, he stops writing and begins a dark pilgrimage in which he is continually tested and continually found wanting • Set against the background of the 1960s, Youth is a remarkable portrait of a consciousness turning in on itself

«Бесчестье» — роман южноафриканского писателя Джона Кутзее, за который он был удостоен Букеровской премии. Спустя четыре года после издания Кутзее был удостоен Нобелевской премии по литературе • После нескольких лет преподавания романтической поэзии в Техническом университете Кейптауна Дэвид Лурье, мужчина средних лет, дважды разведенный, заводит импульсивный роман со студенткой. Роман затягивается; его разоблачают и вызывают в следственный комитет. Признав свою вину, но отказываясь поддаваться давлению и публично раскаяться, Дэвид уходит в отставку и переезжает в уединенное поместье своей дочери Люси • На какое-то время влияние его дочери и спокойная жизнь на ферме помогают ему обрести спокойствие. Но баланс сил в стране меняется. Дэвид и Люси становятся жертвами жестокого нападения, которое выявляет все сложности их отношений

"Дневник плохого года" - роман Дж. М. Кутзи • Выдающемуся стареющему австралийскому писателю предлагается внести свой вклад в книгу под названием "Сильные мнения". Для него, обеспокоенного соучастием Австралии в войнах на Ближнем Востоке, это шанс высказать некоторые насущные опасения: как гражданин современной демократии должен реагировать на участие своего государства в аморальной войне с терроризмом, войне, которая предполагает применение пыток? • Затем в прачечной своего многоквартирного дома он встречает очаровательную молодую женщину. Он предлагает ей поработать над перепечаткой его рукописи. Аня не интересуется политикой, но работа станет приятным развлечением, как и очевидное влечение писателя к ней. Ее бойфренд Алан - консультант по инвестициям, который понимает мир в суровых экономических терминах

Притаившегося в нас зверя мы должны натравливать только на самих себя • Безымянный Магистрат много лет был верным служителем безымянной Империи – он управлял делами в крошечном колониальном городке где-то на Ближнем Востоке. Обитатели города живут в постоянном страхе: они так боятся вторжения варваров, что в определённый момент решают взять дело в свои руки. Магистрат, потрясённый жестокостью окружающих, пытается проявить человечность, но это приводит лишь к тому, что государственная машина оборачивается против него самого • Знаменитый роман Кутзее "В ожидании варваров" – это притча о противостоянии человека и режима, угнетении и жестокости. Плотный и сложный текст поднимает вечные вопросы и лишает покоя: перед вами блистательный философский роман, который способен изменить читателя

"Детство Иисуса" - шестнадцатый по счету роман Кутзее. Наделавший немало шума еще до выхода в свет, он всерьез озадачил критиков во всем мире. Это роман-наваждение, каждое слово которого настолько многозначно, что автор, по его словам, предпочел бы издать его "с чистой обложкой и с чистым титулом", чтобы можно было обнаружить заглавие лишь в конце книги. Полная символов, зашифрованных смыслов, аллегорическая сказка о детстве, безусловно, заинтригует читателей

Scenes from Provincial Life brings together, in one volume, J.M. Coetzee’s majestic trilogy of fictionalised memoir, Boyhood, Youth and Summertime • It opens in a small town in the South Africa of the 1940s. We meet a young boy who, at home, is ill at ease with his father and stifled by his mother’s unconditional love. At school he passes every test that is set for him, but he remains wary of his fellow pupils. Later, as a student of mathematics in Cape Town he prepares to escape to Europe and turn himself into an artist. Once in London, however, the reality is dispiriting. Decades on, an English biographer researches a book about the late writer, John Coetzee. As he interviews important figures in Coetzee’s life, a portrait emerges of an awkward outsider who – even after death – remains dogged by rumours

David is the small boy who is always asking questions. Simon and Ines take care of him in their new town, Estrella. He is learning the language, he has begun to make friends and he has the big dog Bolivar to watch over him • But he'll be seven soon and he should be at school. And so, David is enrolled in the Academy of Dance. It's here, in his new golden dancing slippers, that he learns how to call down the numbers from the sky. Yet it's here too that he will make troubling discoveries about what adults are capable of • The Schooldays of Jesus is a mesmerising tale about growing up, and about the choices we are forced to make in our lives

David is the small boy who is always asking questions. Simon and Ines take care of him in their new town, Estrella. He is learning the language, he has begun to make friends and he has the big dog Bolivar to watch over him • But he'll be seven soon and he should be at school. And so, David is enrolled in the Academy of Dance. It's here, in his new golden dancing slippers, that he learns how to call down the numbers from the sky. But it's here too that he will make troubling discoveries about what adults are capable of • The Schooldays of Jesus is a mesmerising tale about growing up, and about the choices we are forced to make in our lives

Simon and David - a tall ten-year-old - are in a new land, together with a woman named Ines. The small family have found a home in which David can thrive • But David is spotted by Julio Fabricante, the director of a local orphanage, playing football with his friends. He shows unusual talent. When David announces that he wants to live with Julio and the children in his care, Simon and Ines are stunned. David is leaving them, and they can only love him and bear witness • The Death of Jesus is the completion of an incomparable trilogy in which J. M. Coetzee explores the meaning of a world empty of memory but brimming with questions

Paul Rayment is on the threshold of a comfortable old age when a calamitous cycling accident results in the amputation of a leg. Humiliated, his body truncated, his life circumscribed, he turns away from his friends • He hires a nurse named Marijana, with whom he has a European childhood in common: hers in Croatia, his in France. Tactfully and efficiently she ministers to his needs. But his feelings for her, and for her handsome teenage son, are complicated by the sudden arrival on his doorstep of the celebrated Australian novelist Elizabeth Costello, who threatens to take over the direction of his life and the affairs of his heart

In Boyhood, J. M. Coetzee revisits the South Africa of half a century ago, to write about his childhood and interior life. Boyhood's young narrator grew up in a small country town. With a father he imitated but could not respect, and a mother he both adored and resented, he picked his way through a world that refused to explain its rules, but whose rules he knew he must obey. Steering between these contradictions, Boyhood evokes the tensions, delights and terrors of childhood with startling, haunting immediacy. Coetzee examines his young self with the dispassionate curiosity of an explorer rediscovering his own early footprints, and the account of his progress is bright, hard and simply compelling