Sobriquet 39.21

I now own every novel written by J. M. Coetzee. I received Dusklands and In the Heart of the Country (as well as Doubling the Point) in the mail today and just returned from the bookstore where I purchased Foe. I had not anticipated working on Coetzee's pre-1990 fiction when I began the dissertation process, thinking I would be writing a multi-author study of a rather obscure theme in contemporary fiction. Though I may still take that path, after speaking with my adviser, I feel I should read all of Coetzee's novels before ruling out a single-author study on Coetzee alone. Either way, I reason, a familiarity with the entirety of Coetzee's ouevre can only help my project, even if a knowledge of Magda in In the Heart of the Country, for instance, merely enables me to better understand the critics' discussions of the author's penchant for female protagonists in relation to Elizabeth Curren or Elizabeth Costello. Of course, I would like the reading to yield an extra chapter or two's worth of material...I do want to finish the dissertation, after all.

As always, I will report my progress here.

For tomorrow: Do what I did today, and the day before today, and the day before that...