The City Where Coetzee Is God
When I arrived in Cape Town, South Africa, in October, at the windy end of spring, setting foot on African soil for the first time in my life, it wasn’t to indulge in the animal voyeurism that wealthy newlyweds tell me will change my life. The prospect of being stuck in a jeep watching wildebeest pour through the veld did not intrigue me. Instead, I was on a hunt for traces of one of the world’s strangest writers, J. M. Coetzee, in the city from which he had emerged, a city that he’d intermittently written about—without revealing much of it—and then left, in 2002. The 86-year-old author’s legacy, I’d been told, stirred the kinds of passions that have gone extinct pretty much everywhere else on the planet. Here was my chance to witness not a band of rutting gnu but something I had not imagined could still exist: a communal literary obsession in a postliterary age, at the center of which is a man whom acolytes call, simply, “God.”
