Dusklands

About this book

J. M. Coetzee's first published fiction includes two novellas. *The Vietnam Project* is a five–part, first–person story of a mythographer (mythmaker) working for the United States Department of Defense whose job is to write an essay for his overseer Coetzee detailing psychological colonization strategies to deploy against the Vietnamese during the early 1970s. At the other end is *The Narrative of Jacobus Coetzee,* author Coetzee's "integral" translation from Afrikaans of a Boer settler and six Hottentot servants' elephant–hunting expedition in 1760 and their contact with the Namaqua people. The latter is also written in the first person. Together, both narratives share a dialogue about the affected colonizer in the process of colonization, the (re)writing of history, the ethics of captivity, and relationship between the writer and the written, namely author Coetzee's grappling with the idea of complicity. On the whole, *Dusklands* is a fierce debut that demands close reading and intellectual reckoning.

Themes & subjects

About the author

J. M. Coetzee

9 Feb 1940

John Maxwell Coetzee FRSL OMG (born 9 February 1940) is a South African and Australian novelist, essayist, linguist, translator and recipient of the 2003 Nobel Prize in Literature. He is one of the most critically acclaimed and decorated authors in the English language. He has won the Booker Prize (twice), the CNA Literary Award (thrice), the Jerusalem Prize, the Prix Femina étranger, and The Irish Times International Fiction Prize, and holds a number of other awards and honorary doctorates. [source](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._M._Coetzee)