It's not that I have anything against J. M. Coetzee, in fact, I think he's a wonderful man. The thing about J. M. Coetzee that scares me (aside from his almost total lack of a personal life, his robotic and unrevealing public persona) is that he looks amazingly like an uncle of mine.
Observe J. M. Coetzee's recent photograph on the back of his book, Slow Man:
Remove one or two of the wrinkles and you have my Uncle, whom I shall refer to as John. John and Coetzee are two entirely different people, from different backgrounds, and yet they appear almost identical. Where Coetzee cares about the environment, never eats meat, bicycles everywhere to keep in shape and only says as much as necessary, Uncle John doesn't care about the environment (he has a Hummer as his car of choice, I believe), he never bikes, he eats all the meat he can get onto his plate and will never shut up once he gets going (kind of like me).
I only realized the "lost sibling" aspect of their looks while I was browsing around my room, looking for a paperback of Coetzee's Disgrace. I found the paperback next to a stack of other Coetzee texts, including Diary of a Bad Year, Youth, Waiting for the Barbarians and Slow Man. It was on the back picture of Slow Man that I got the nasty shock.
Uncle John and I don't get along well. And now, my interactions with him have poisoned my interactions with Coetzee. I just can't get past the face. (I thought I was deeper than that)
JPC
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