Word: novelists
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Novelist J.M. Coetzee adapts Dostoyevsky's life -- too freely...
...situation in The Master of Petersburg (Viking; 250 pages; $21.95) is this: J.M. Coetzee, the South African novelist, has placed himself in the turbulent, ironic mind of Fyodor Dostoyevsky. It is 1869; the writer is 49, self-exiled in Dresden at mid-career, with Poor Folk and Crime and Punishment behind him and The Brothers Karamazov far in the future. He is a passionate, tormented idealist, still roiled by the Western liberal notions of social and political freedom that had swept the Russian intelligentsia a generation before. But the new, younger Russian intellectuals are not liberals; they are nihilists...
...Zealand, Pauline Parker and Juliet Hulme were convicted of bludgeoning Pauline's mother Honora to death. The girls were "detained at Her Majesty's pleasure" until 1959, when Juliet left New Zealand and Pauline went into hiding. It was recently revealed that Juliet became a best-selling mystery novelist who lives in Scotland and writes under the name Anne Perry. Perry claims to remember little of the murder; the hero of several of her novels is a detective, William Monk, who occasionally suffers from amnesia...
...novelist Doris Lessing is publishing the first volume of her autobiography. Already she is skeptical. "Were I to write it aged 85, how different would it be?" That's Lessing -- always doubting, exacting, comparing. Under My Skin (HarperCollins; 419 pages; $25) is not so much a recollection of her early life in Southern Rhodesia as a dissection of it. Remote styles of life -- in a colonial outpost at the end of the British regime in Africa, with its hopeless yearnings and longings, and in communist circles of the 1930s, with their blithe and heartless dreams of a brave new world...
Kenzaburo Oe, a novelist who captured the alienation and moral malaise of Japan's "Westernized" postwar generation, became his country's second recipient of the Nobel Prize in Literature. (Japan's other winner was Yasunari Kawabata, in 1968.) Today's award triggered an outpouring of national pride -- newscasts led with the story and the Prime Minister issued congrats. The warm fuzzies all around contrast with the 59-year-old Oe's dark vision, steeped in the aftermath of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki...