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Age of Iron
  
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Age of Iron (Library Binding)

by J. M. Coetzee (Author)
4.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)

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Product details

  • Library Binding
  • Publisher: San Val (Sep 1998)
  • Language English
  • ISBN-10: 1417647574
  • ISBN-13: 978-1417647576
  • Product Dimensions: 20.3 x 13.3 x 1.9 cm
  • Average Customer Review: 4.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)

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Customer Reviews

4 Reviews
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4 star:
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3 star:    (0)
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Average Customer Review
4.8 out of 5 stars (4 customer reviews)
 
 
 
 
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13 of 13 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars The process of dying and the death of the body politic., 25 Feb 1999
By A Customer
This review is from: Age of Iron (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.
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7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars A taut and gripping book, 12 Aug 2005
By Philippe Horak (Zug, Switzerland) - See all my reviews
(TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)   
This review is from: Age of Iron (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.
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4.0 out of 5 stars Raises questions, gives few answers, 30 Aug 2009
By Jesper Jorgensen - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   
This review is from: Age of Iron (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.
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