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"It is, quite simply, a magnificent and unforgettable work." --The Daily Telegraph
"Coetzee is one of the greatest writers of our time.... Age of Iron is taut, ironic, grieving and, finally, astonishing." --Los Angeles Times
"A remarkable work by a brilliant writer." --The Wall Street Journal
"Coetzee is one of the greatest writers of our time.... Age of Iron is taut, ironic, grieving and, finally, astonishing." --Los Angeles Times
"A remarkable work by a brilliant writer." --The Wall Street Journal
Product Description
An old woman is dying of cancer in Cape Town. A classics professor, Mrs Curren has always been opposed to the brutality of apartheid, but has lived insulated from its true horrors. Now she is suddenly forced to come to terms with the iron-hearted rage that the system has wrought.
In an extended letter addressed to her daughter, who has long since fled to America, Mrs Curren recounts the strange events of her dying days. She witnesses the burning of a nearby black township; discovers the bullet-riddled body of her servant's son, and a teenage black activist hiding in her house is killed by security forces. And through it all, her only companion is a homeless man, an alcoholic who appears on her doorstep.
J M Coetzee was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2003.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
17 of 17 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
This novel considers the deterioration of the physical body of the female protagonist as she dies of cancer alongside the demise of the body politic in South Africa in the 1984-86 State of Emergency. Elizabeth Curran returns home after receiving the news of her cancer to find that a vagrant has moved into her garden. The shock of her recent news and the terrible violence that is being enacted all around her in the townships causes her to form a bond with this man. She is unable to tell her daughter of her illness and this novel becomes a letter to the daughter in America which she will receive only when her mother is dead. It becomes clear during the novel that Elizabeth can talk to this vagrant about the things that concern her, and she openly discusses her inability to understand the violence and the bloodshed that she witnesses. Throughout the novel the reader is made aware of the tenuous position of a white liberal woman in South Africa and the question of the right to speak is perpetually one that bothers both the reader and Elizabeth. Ultimately this book reveals the difficulties of being a part of a system that you disagree with and the almost impossible task of trying to speak out against it with language and not violence.
8 of 9 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
In this novel first published in 1990, Mr Coetzee gives the grim account of both a human being facing imminent death and a country - South Africa - still immersed in the tragedy of the apartheid regime. Mrs Curren, a professor of classics in Cape Town, has just received the fatal news from her doctor, Dr Syfert, that she suffers from an incurable form of cancer. Part of the narrative consists in an imaginary letter Mrs Curren will never write to her daughter who left for America in 1976. Indeed she does not consider it to be just to share her burden with her daughter but, as she puts it, "to resist the craving to share my death", "to take my leave without bitterness" and "to embrace death as my own, mine alone." But since it is nearly impossible for her to approach death without the support of another human being, she ends up sharing her thoughts and life with Mr Vercueil, a tramp she finds one morning sleeping in the garden of her house.
Death is omnipresent in Mr Coetzee's work, not only Mrs Curren's but in the townships of Cape Town where the lives of the coloureds are worth next to nothing and therefore death is as common as life for the people obliged to live there. A powerful, sad and unforgettable tale whose characters and events cut to the bone.
Death is omnipresent in Mr Coetzee's work, not only Mrs Curren's but in the townships of Cape Town where the lives of the coloureds are worth next to nothing and therefore death is as common as life for the people obliged to live there. A powerful, sad and unforgettable tale whose characters and events cut to the bone.
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
An retired middle-class woman learns that she is dying from incurable and painful cancer. The same day a vagabond sleeps in her garden. The time is the final years of apartheid in South Africa. While the country and the manners of people are fallling apart, the human tragedies of blacks spill over into her house and the bumb becomes her unlikely companion. The novel is written as a letter to her long lost daughter who escaped the South African situation by moving to the US.
The story is deep, calm and questioning. The reader apparently learns something about what it is like to be in the shoes of this old lady. Her thoughts about death and living are not the same as those of Micheal K. or the Magistrate (Waiting for the Barbarians), but the whole style, open ended at times, belongs to this woman. J. M. Coetze simply seems to have a remarkable talent for empathy. With novels like this one he truly fulfils one of the main objectives of a novel: learning what it is to be another person, and here during times of critical contemplations.
The story is deep, calm and questioning. The reader apparently learns something about what it is like to be in the shoes of this old lady. Her thoughts about death and living are not the same as those of Micheal K. or the Magistrate (Waiting for the Barbarians), but the whole style, open ended at times, belongs to this woman. J. M. Coetze simply seems to have a remarkable talent for empathy. With novels like this one he truly fulfils one of the main objectives of a novel: learning what it is to be another person, and here during times of critical contemplations.
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Most Recent Customer Reviews
Not for the fainthearted
This is a serious, very powerful and, at times, painful read, typical of Coetzee. Whilst much is dark - the narrator is dying of cancer, and through her the reader witnesses... Read more
Published 7 months ago by Katravel
Reflection on Intertextuality in Coetzee's Age of Iron
Age of Iron is an epistolary novel; it is one long letter that Mrs. Curren wants to be sent to her daughter after she passes away. Read more
Published on 18 May 2010 by M. F. Buettner
Death is the only truth left
In this violent text, an old woman learns that she has an incurable cancer. She meets her `angel of death' and together they pass the last months of her life in `a world of rage... Read more
Published on 13 May 2008 by Luc REYNAERT
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