Otavan kirjasto series - publisher   novel  
... Otavan kirjasto
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Includes

17
y separately published work icon Waiting for the Barbarians J. M. Coetzee , London : Secker and Warburg , 1980 6303247 1980 single work novel 'How do you eradicate contempt, especially when that contempt is founded on nothing more substantial than differences in table manners, variations in the structure of the eyelid? Shall I tell you what I sometimes wish? I wish that these barbarians would rise up and teach us a lesson, so that we would learn to respect them.

After twenty years of peacefully running one of the Empire’s settlements, a magistrate takes pity on an enemy barbarian who has been tortured. He enters into an awkward intimate relationship with her, and then is himself imprisoned as an enemy of the state.

Waiting for the Barbarians is a disturbing political fable about oppression, the fraught desire for reparation, and about living with a troubled conscience under an unjust regime.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

Barbaarit tulevat
Helsinki : Otava , 1983
23
y separately published work icon Life & Times of Michael K J. M. Coetzee , Johannesburg : Ravan Press , 1974 6181890 1974 single work novel (taught in 2 units)

"From the author of Waiting for the Barbarians, another startling and disturbing portrait of today's South Africa, a land and a people beset by violence and siege. Coetzee here tells the story of a handicapped young man who has worked as a municipal gardener in Cape Town. His mother is dying, and she wishes to return to her birthplace out in the veldt. Without the required transit passes, mother and son set out on a journey that will end in death for her and in a new but temporary life on an abandoned farm for him. His respite in isolation and peace does not last long, however; grotesque reality soon returns to trouble this quiet new world. Against the solitude of this private drama, Coetzee paints an eloquent and pained picture of his homeland and of the bureaucrats, doctors, army deserters, and camp guards who reveal the stress and qualms of their existence and who uneasily sense that there is no conclusion to their troubles and no future for their lives." (Source: Libraries Australia)

Michael K : n elämä
Helsinki : Otava , 1984
139
y separately published work icon Disgrace J. M. Coetzee , London : Secker and Warburg , 1999 6173241 1999 single work novel (taught in 11 units)

After years teaching Romantic poetry at the Technical University of Cape Town, David Lurie, middle-aged and twice divorced, has an impulsive affair with a student. The affair sours; he is denounced and summoned before a committee of inquiry. Willing to admit his guilt, but refusing to yield to pressure to repent publicly, he resigns and retreats to his daughter Lucy's isolated smallholding. For a time, his daughter's influence and the natural rhythms of the farm promise to harmonise his discordant life. But the balance of power in the country is shifting. He and Lucy become victims of a savage and disturbing attack which brings into relief all the faultlines in their relationship.' (Publisher's blurb)

Häpeäpaalu
Helsinki : Otava , 2003
139
y separately published work icon Disgrace J. M. Coetzee , London : Secker and Warburg , 1999 6173241 1999 single work novel (taught in 11 units)

After years teaching Romantic poetry at the Technical University of Cape Town, David Lurie, middle-aged and twice divorced, has an impulsive affair with a student. The affair sours; he is denounced and summoned before a committee of inquiry. Willing to admit his guilt, but refusing to yield to pressure to repent publicly, he resigns and retreats to his daughter Lucy's isolated smallholding. For a time, his daughter's influence and the natural rhythms of the farm promise to harmonise his discordant life. But the balance of power in the country is shifting. He and Lucy become victims of a savage and disturbing attack which brings into relief all the faultlines in their relationship.' (Publisher's blurb)

Häpeäpaalu
Helsinki : Otava , 2000
161
y separately published work icon Youth : Scenes from Provincial Life J. M. Coetzee , London : Secker and Warburg , 2002 Z1212327 2002 single work novel (taught in 1 units)

"The narrator of Youth, a student in the South Africa of the 1950s, has long been plotting an escape from his native country: from the stifling love of his mother, from a father whose failures haunt him, and from what he is sure is impending revolution. Studying mathematics, reading poetry, saving money, he tries to ensure that when he arrives in the real world, wherever that may be, he will be prepared to experience life to its full intensity, and transform it into art." "Arriving at last in London, however, he finds neither poetry nor romance. Instead he succumbs to the monotony of life as a computer programmer, from which random, loveless affairs offer no relief. Devoid of inspiration, he stops writing. An awkward colonial, a constitutional outsider, he begins a dark pilgrimage in which he is continually tested and continually found wanting" (Source: Viking publisher's blurb)

Nuoruus : kohtauksia syrjaisesta elamasta II
Helsinki : Otava , 2004
161
y separately published work icon Youth : Scenes from Provincial Life J. M. Coetzee , London : Secker and Warburg , 2002 Z1212327 2002 single work novel (taught in 1 units)

"The narrator of Youth, a student in the South Africa of the 1950s, has long been plotting an escape from his native country: from the stifling love of his mother, from a father whose failures haunt him, and from what he is sure is impending revolution. Studying mathematics, reading poetry, saving money, he tries to ensure that when he arrives in the real world, wherever that may be, he will be prepared to experience life to its full intensity, and transform it into art." "Arriving at last in London, however, he finds neither poetry nor romance. Instead he succumbs to the monotony of life as a computer programmer, from which random, loveless affairs offer no relief. Devoid of inspiration, he stops writing. An awkward colonial, a constitutional outsider, he begins a dark pilgrimage in which he is continually tested and continually found wanting" (Source: Viking publisher's blurb)

Nuoruus : kohtauksia syrjaisesta elamasta II
Helsinki : Otava , 2003
168
y separately published work icon Elizabeth Costello : Eight Lessons J. M. Coetzee , Milsons Point : Knopf , 2003 Z1064567 2003 single work novel (taught in 3 units)

In Elizabeth Costello: Eight Lessons, the eponymous protagonist is a retired author of international literary acclaim, who now spends her time giving guest lectures and interviews at scholarly events around the world. Old age has loosened, rather than reified, her ethical and literary convictions, and swelled her emotional reserves; rather than provide the staid academic wisdom expected of her, Costello offers provocative, unsettling opinions on issues such as animal rights, literary censorship, and the nature of belief - opinions she may or may not believe in herself. Profoundly aware of itself, Coetzee's novel is about human morality and mortality, but above all, about literature itself and the ethical responsibilities of writers and readers.

Elizabeth Costello
Helsinki : Otava , 2005
180
y separately published work icon Slow Man J. M. Coetzee , Milsons Point : Knopf , 2005 Z1209346 2005 single work novel Paul Rayment is on the threshold of a comfortable old age when a calamitous cycling accident results in the amputation of a leg. Humiliated, his body truncated, his life circumscribed, he turns away from his friends. He hires a nurse named Marijana, with whom he has a European childhood in common: hers in Croatia, his in France. Tactfully and efficiently she ministers to his needs. But his feelings for her, and for her handsome teenage son, are complicated by the sudden arrival on his doorstep of the celebrated Australian novelist Elizabeth Costello, who threatens to take over the direction of his life and the affairs of his heart. (Publisher's blurb) Hidas mies Helsinki : Otava , 2006
187
y separately published work icon Dusklands J. M. Coetzee , Johannesburg : Ravan Press , 1974 6173882 1974 single work novel

"This work contains two novellas. In the first [The Vietnam Project], a specialist in psychological warfare is driven to murderous action by the stresses of a macabre project to win the Vietnam War, and in the second [The Narrative of Jacobus Coetzee], a megalomaniac Boer frontiersman wreaks hideous vengeance on a Hottentot tribe". (Source: Libraries Australia)

Hämärän maat
Helsinki : Otava , 2007
y separately published work icon In the Heart of the Country J. M. Coetzee , London : Secker and Warburg , 1977 6204795 1977 single work novel Maan sydämessä Helsinki : Otava , 1986
y separately published work icon Foe J. M. Coetzee , London : Secker and Warburg , 1986 6180940 1986 single work novel (taught in 1 units)

'In the early eighteenth century, a woman finds herself set adrift from a mutinous ship and cast ashore on a remote desert island. There she finds shelter with its only other inhabitants: a man named Cruso and his tongueless slave Friday. In time, she builds a life for herself as Cruso's companion and, eventually, his lover.' (Source: Libraries Australia)

Foe
Helsinki : Otava , 1987
y separately published work icon The Master of Petersburg J. M. Coetzee , London : Secker and Warburg , 1994 6204024 1994 single work novel

In the fall of 1869 Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky, lately a resident of Germany, is summoned back to St. Petersburg by the sudden death of his stepson, Pavel. Half crazed with grief, stricken by epileptic seizures, and erotically obsessed with his stepson's landlady, Dostoevsky is nevertheless intent on unraveling the enigma of Pavel's life. Was the boy a suicide or a murder victim? Did he love his stepfather or despise him? Was he a disciple of the revolutionary Nechaev, who even now is somewhere in St. Petersburg pursuing a dream of apocalyptic violence? As he follows his stepson's ghost - and becomes enmeshed in the same demonic conspiracies that claimed the boy - Dostoevsky emerges as a figure of unfathomable contradictions: naive and calculating, compassionate and cruel, pious and unspeakably perverse. (Source: Libraries Australia)

Pietarin mestari
Helsinki : Otava , 1994
y separately published work icon Boyhood : Scenes from Provincial Life J. M. Coetzee , London : Secker and Warburg , 1997 6309688 1997 single work novel

Coetzee has been reluctant to talk about himself. Now, revisiting the South Africa of a half century ago, he writes about his childhood and his own interior life. Boyhood's young narrator grew up in a new development north of Cape Town, tormented by guilt and fear. With a father he did not respect, and a mother he both adored and resented, he led a double life - at school the brilliant and well-behaved student, at home the princely despot, always terrified of losing his mother's love. His first encounters with literature, the awakenings of sexual desire, and a growing awareness of apartheid left him with baffling questions; and only in his love of the veld ("farms are places of freedom, of life") could he find a sense of belonging. Bold and telling, this masterly evocation of a young boy's life is the book Coetzee's many admirers have been waiting for, but never could have expected (Source: Libraries Australia).

Poikavuodet : kohtauksia syrjäisestä elämästä
Helsinki : Otava , 1999
Last amended 26 Aug 2013 08:55:59
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