Double Flee A

J.M. Coetzee, the winner of two well-deserved Booker prizes and a Nobel, is from South Africa.

I recall a recent South African news story about an anti-rape device that tears penises apart upon the rapist's attempted retraction, and I have long heard rumors of a flame-throwing car alarm, but even that didn't prepare me for a story about a murder victim's disembowelment and a strange and vivid, ahem, racial situation on the same day. Looks like J.M. Coetzee's world is more sharp, dangerous, and colorful than I'd imagined, but now that I think about it the tense realities of South Africa obviously make for a more thought-provoking breeding ground than Minneapolis. Everybody in Minneapolis wanted to be a writer two years ago, but when there's nothing taking place, the stories aren't very good.
Nineteenth-century St. Petersburg, Tolstoy.
Post-war Mississippi, Faulkner.
Twenty-first century suburban United States, hmm.

posted by dale @ 10:18 PM