I tried. I want you to know how hard I tried, and I am usually good at this sort of thing. It’s just, I mean, to tell you the truth, you’re boring. I don’t know if you are boring all the time, or just in this one instance, but it’s been a few days, and it is just not abating. I really thought we would get along, but instead of wide open spaces, your story was cramped blathering about Kafka and African novels and pig farms and I don’t know what. You give me a dour old woman with a sourpuss and a dry, hyper intellectual nervous monotony. I’m doing this for enjoyment, remember?
I’m talking to you, J.M. Coetzee. You character is boring, your words are too numerous, and that gimmick from the beginning where you kept jolting me loose from my gaze on the action; it is unpleasant to read. I understand, I think, a little bit what you are doing. I think you should stop, because the people who read that kind of stuff are unhappy enough already, they already have heaps of philosophy, and they don’t need to be reading the bland confusion of your book on top of that.
I’ll never know if this one gets better, because I just can’t. That’s rare for me.
I read at least a couple of dozen books each year. I’m ninety pages in, and I skipped over twenty of those, that whole speech at the college her son teaches in. I don’t claim to be proficient critic of literature, I consider that it might be intentional—that it’s written with the intention to be boring because now your reader is thinking of what it would be like to be in that audience, listening to that reticent woman drone on and on about animals and Jews. Maybe you mean for it to frustrate me, so that rather than simply telling me that the students felt bored and restless, I felt bored and restless, (which is not the same as saying I was made to feel how they are feeling). If you counted on that reaction, then good on you.
I still don’t think I’ll finish it.
[I just did a little research and you are serious. Sorry. I know you are very talented, since you have two Booker prizes and a Nobel. I know you are very disciplined and principled and you are also super successful. So really, what do I know?]
