Eileen Chang made it to 74. Woolf, 59. Oodgeroo Noonuccal, 72. Wisława Szymborska, 88. Naguib Mahfouz managed 94 (a good innings). Baldwin, 68. Patrick White, 78. Soseki, 49. Cao Xueqin was about 40 or 50; the records vary. Beckett reached 83 – JM Coetzee’s current age. And Imre Kertész, brilliant, embattled – by Parkinson’s, by depression – lived to see 86.
To conceive of death’s apparition – of a death haunting – is to participate in it: sometimes vicariously, sometimes directly. Coetzee, we must assume – no more nor less than any of us – does not know how, or when, the end may arrive. But if The Pole and Other Stories were his final work, it would be astonishing – and no less so for comprising an 18-year span, the latest addition to a career that now extends over nearly half a century.
