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Amos Oz by Coetzee

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  ‘Whither Dost Thou Hasten?’ J.M. Coetzee March 5, 1998 issue Reviewed: Panther in the Basement by Amos Oz, translated by Nicholas de Lange Harcourt Brace, 147 pp., $21.00 The Iron Tracks by Aharon Appelfeld, translated by Jeffrey M. Green Schocken, 195 pp., $21.00 Aharon Appelfeld; drawing by David Levine Buy Print 1. In his new novella Amos Oz tells a story he has told several times before, sometimes as autobiography,  sometimes worked up into fiction. At its barest, the story is about a boy at a crossroads in his life: Is he to continue on the path of childhood, living out fantasies of violence encouraged in him by his immediate surroundings, or is he to break into the next stage of life, a stage at which he may be required to love as well as to hate, and at which questions may begin to have two sides to them? The fact that the crossroads in the boy’s life coincides with a crossroads in the life of his nation— Panther in the Basement  is set in Jerusalem in the last y...
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The Solitary Notetaker

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August 11, 2005 issue Reviewed: Campo Santo by W.G. Sebald, translated from the German by Anthea Bell Random House, 221 pp., $24.95 Unrecounted by W.G. Sebald, translated from the German by Michael Hamburger, with lithographs by Jan Peter Tripp New Directions, 109 pp., $22.95 W. G. Sebald; drawing by David Levine Buy Print When W.G. Sebald died in a car accident in December 2001, he was eulogized in Great Britain and America as one of the great writers of our time. And yet, before his first book,  The Emigrants , was translated into English in 1996, very few had ever heard of him outside Germany. The reception of that first book and the others that soon followed in quick order was simply astonishing. He was called one of the most original voices to have come out of Europe in recent years, a Teutonic Borges, strange, sublime, and haunting. “Is literary greatness still possible?” Susan Sontag asked in the  TLS  and then replied: “One of the few answers available to English-...
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