As in Coetzee’s earlier book Elizabeth Costello (2003), these discussions are presented as “moral tales” or “lessons”, often in the form of stories within stories, whose ultimate meaning is debated or deferred. The four stories in which she appears include conversations she has with John and her daughter Helen, who live in the United States and France respectively. But not for me.”Įlizabeth’s preoccupations in “the evening of her life” are more than ever with her own mortality, the notion of an afterlife, and her strong ethical views on animals. When John tries to persuade her that there is always hope of recovery, she replies, paraphrasing Kafka: “Yes, there is hope. She summons her son John to Spain to be with her as she “does the business” of ending her own life. In the last of these stories, Elizabeth has been diagnosed with early dementia. Readers familiar with Coetzee’s work will recognise the fictional character of Australian feminist writer Elizabeth Costello in four stories: As a Woman Grows Older, The Old Woman and the Cats, The Glass Abattoir, and Hope. Although they are narrated in the third person, it is most often a woman’s perspective that drives the narrative. The collection’s six stories explore familiar Coetzeean themes of love, death, ageing, art and human-animal interaction. Review: The Pole and Other Stories – J.M. Allowing his writing to appear in translation first is a way of questioning the assumption that English is a dominant or “universal” language.Īccess to these three stories alone makes the new publication worth reading, but this edition also includes three other stories originally published singly in English and collected here for the first time. Coetzee has suggested he is interested in his work appearing in the Southern Hemisphere before it appears in the Global North. This delayed publication in the anglophone world is deliberate. This also applies to two other stories in the collection: Hope, which was originally published in Italian in 2019, and The Dog, first published in 2018 as El Perro in a Spanish-language edition of Coetzee’s stories titled Siete Cuentos Morales (Seven Moral Tales).
Ron Charles of the Washington Post called it "a tender, carefully polished work that it seems like a blessing we had no right to expect."ġ999 - Finalist for the 1999 National Book Award for PlainsongĢ005 - Finalist for the Book Sense Award for EventideĢ014 - Folio Prize shortlist for Benediction Our Souls at Night, his final work, was published posthumously in 2015 and received wide praise. On November 30, 2014, at the age of 71, Kent Haruf died at his home in Salida, Colorado, of interstitial lung disease. Library Journal described the writing as "honest storytelling that is compelling and rings true." Jonathan Miles saw it as a "repeat performance" and "too goodhearted." The New York Times' Verlyn Klinkenborg called it "a novel so foursquare, so delicate and lovely, that it has the power to exalt the reader." Plainsong won the Mountains & Plains Booksellers Award and the Maria Thomas Award in Fiction and was a finalist for the National Book Award for Fiction.Įventide, a sequel to Plainsong, was published in 2004. Plainsong was published in 1999 and became a U.S. A number of his short stories have appeared in literary magazines. Where You Once Belonged followed in 1990. His first novel, The Tie That Binds (1984), received a Whiting Award and a special Hemingway Foundation/PEN citation. He had three daughters from his first marriage.Īll of Haruf's novels take place in the fictional town of Holt, in eastern Colorado, a town based on Yuma, Colorado, one of Haruf's residences in the early 1980s. He lived with his wife, Cathy, in Salida, Colorado until his death in 2014. He graduated with a BA from Nebraska Wesleyan University in 1965, where he would later teach, and earned an MFA from the Iowa Writers' Workshop at the University of Iowa in 1973.īefore becoming a writer, Haruf worked in a variety of places, including a chicken farm in Colorado, a construction site in Wyoming, a rehabilitation hospital in Denver, a hospital in Phoenix, a presidential library in Iowa, an alternative high school in Wisconsin, as an English teacher with the Peace Corps in Turkey, and colleges in Nebraska and Illinois. Haruf was born in Pueblo, Colorado, the son of a Methodist minister.
Education-B.A., Nebraska Wesleyan University M.F.A., Iowa Writers' WorkshopĪlan Kent Haruf was an American novelist and author of six novels, all set in the fictional town of Holt, Colorado.
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