GatesyRead

I have had ' Disgrace' on my shelf for a while now, and at last, I felt ready to engage with it. Coetzee is a much-revered writer, so the fault is all mine – the only other Coetzee novel I have read is the experimental ' Diary of a Bad Year' (2007). ' Bad Year'  involves a 72-year-old South African writer who falls for a younger woman. ' Disgrace' begins with a similar premise – 52-year-old Professor David Lurie moves from a falling for a woman whose love he pays for (Soraya) to an even less appropriate target for his affections: a student in his Romantic literature class. Melanie is at first rather passive in the affair, but a menacing boyfriend and a protective, prayerful father put an end to things and Professor Lurie is in trouble with the university authorities. Were he willing to make a public apology, the matter might be put behind him; but he is not and his days of teaching are over. At this point the novel moves from the diary of a bad man to

Under the Jaguar Sun was published posthumously in 1986 in Italian and 1988 in English, with Calvino passing in 1985, aged 62. Ether Calvino’s note relays that Calvino began the book in 1972, with only three of the stories finished (published here). A few days before he fell ill, Calvino had written about the idea of the framing device (here the five senses) – ‘We consider poetic a production in which each individual experience acquires prominence through its detachment from the general continuum, while it retains a kind of glint of that unlimited vastness’ (p.86). How I would like to hear more! The title story ‘Under the Jaguar Sun’ is set in Oaxaca, Mexico (a city I once visited and loved). The narrator and his wife Olivia are visiting Mexico and while their love life is muted, their sense of taste is a sensual delight. The narrator speaks of his desire for oneness: ‘Our subjective, individual selves … find their amplification and completion only in the unity of the couple’. Yet in t