Coeztee's "Diary of a bad year"

Excelente libro. Me gusta pensar que gracias a autores como Coetzee y Kundera voy aprendiendo a apreciar mejor los personajes de los libros, sobre todo los del realismo, los que me generan algo de repulsión natural, pero cada vez más ternura y curiosidad. Quizá no se entienda más que desde mi mente, pero estos libros marcan un antes y después en mi forma de leer, libros como La insoportable levedad del ser, y Madame Bovary. 

En fin, "the work of a master" como dice la crítica del daily telegraph. Coetzee tiene una forma de escribir que es soothing. Este es un libro que en manos de otro escritor hubiese sido catalogado como depresivo quizá, pero así como es resulta hermoso. Dispara líneas nuevas de reflexiones en muchos sentidos.

""We are all players in the global market: if we do not compete, we will perish." The market is where we are, where we find ourselves. How we got to be here we may not ask. It is like being born into a world we have no hand in choosing, to parents unknown. We are here, that is all. Now it is our fate to compete." "You may withdraw if you wish (...) but your competitors will most assuredly not. As soon as you lay down your arms, you will be slaughtered. We are locked ineluctably into a battle of all against all."

"...there come times when the outrage and the shame are so great that all calculation, all prudence, is overwhelmed and one must act, that is to say, speak."

"Curious, given how alien the ideal of spiritual transformation has become, that the music of transformation still retains some of its power to move us, to create a swelling feeling of exaltation, such an odd emotion in our day."

"Is it too much to say that the music we call Romantic has an erotic inspiration -that it unceasingly pushes further, tries to enable the listening subject to leave the body behind, ro be rapt away (as if harking the birdsong, heavensong), to become a living soul? If this is true, then the erotics of Romantic music could not be more different from the erotics of the present day. In young lovers today one detects not the faintest flicker of that old metaphysical hunger, whose code word for itself was yearning." 

"So i will tell you frankly, I was never embarrassed by your thoughts, I even helped them along a little. And nothing has changed since I left, you can go on having thoughts about me to your heart's content (that is the beauty of thoughts, isn't it, that distance doesn't matter, and separation)."

"Shouting us not simply talking writ loud and large. It is not a means of communication at all, but a way of drowning out rivals. It is a form of self-assertion, one of the purest there is, easy to practise and highly effective. A four-year-old may not be as strong as a grown man, but he certainly is louder."

"Only now, later in life, do I begin to see how ordinary people, Nietzsche's bored higher animals, really cope with their environment. They cope not by becoming irritated but by lowering their expectations. They cope by learning to sit through things, by letting the mental machinery run at a slower rate. They slumber; and because they do not mind slumbering they do not mind being bored."