By Night In Chile - pg. 54

..., because everything was foundering, as the poet says, and then I was walking alone through the streets of Santiago, thinking of Alexander III and Urban IV and Boniface VIII, while fresh breeze caressed my face, trying to wake me up properly, but still I cannot have been properly awake, for deep in my brain I could hear the voices of the popes, like the distant screeching of a flock of birds, a clear sign that part of my mind was still dreaming or obstinately refusing to emerge from the labyrinth of dreams, that parade ground where the wizened youth is hiding, along with the dead poets who were living then, and who now, against the certainty of imminent oblivion, are erecting a miserable crypt in my cranial vault, building it with their names, their silhouettes cut from black cardboard and the debris of their works, and although the wizened youth is not among them, since in those days he was just a kid from the south, the rainy border-lands, the banks of our nation's mightiest river, the fearsome Bio-Bio, all poets whose works implacable time was demolishing even then, as I walked away from Farewell's house through the Santiago night, and continues to demolish now, as I prop myself up on one elbow, and will go on demolishing when I am gone, that is, when I shall exist no longer or only as a reputation, and my reputation resembling a sunset, as the reputations of others resemble a whale, a bare hill, a boat, a trail of smoke or a labyrinthine city, my reputation like a sunset will contemplate through half-closed eyelids time's little twitch and the devastation it wreaks, time that sweeps over the parade ground like a conjectural breeze, drowning writers in its whirlpools like figures in a painting by Delville, the writers whose books I reviewed, the writers whose work I criticized, the moribund of Chile and America whose voices called out my name, Father Ibacache, Father Ibacache, think of us as you walk away from Farewell's house with a dancer's sprightly gait, think of us as your steps lead you into the inexorable Santiago night, Father Ibacache, Father Ibacache, think of our ambitions and our hopes, think of our mute, inglorious lot as men and citizens, compatriots and writers, as you penetrate the phantasmagoric folds of time, time that we perceive in three dimensions only, alhtough in fact it has four or maybe five, like the castellated shadow of Sordello, which Sordello? a shadow not even sun can obliterate.

The Sun Also Rises - Closing

“Yes,” I said. “Isn’t it pretty to think so?”

Marks Of Identity - pg. 254

"I would like to see Lives Without Aim published in the same collection as The Old Man and the Sea."
"Do you like William Faulkner/'
"He's a fraud. My favorite writers are Maugham and Vicki Baum."
"Are you familiar with Sartre's work?"
"My wife thumbed through one of his books and she says he writes about filth."
"And Kafka?"
"I've never read him."
"What do you think of Robbe-Grillet."
"Who did you say?"
"Are you follower of the nouveau roman?"
"Neither my wife nor I can handle French. Spanish is more than enough for us."
"How long did it take you to write your last novel?"
"Eight days."
"Do you rewrite."
"Never, What's gained in niceties is lost in a lack of spontaneity."
"What narrative technique do you prefer?"
"Technique is another fraud. Cervantes didn't know anything about theories when he wrote Don Quixote."
"Are you working on something new?"
"Yes. I have in mind a novel about the battle of the generations, between fathers and sons, and I'm going to set it in Harlem."
"Oh, you've been to the United States?"
"No, this is the first time I've ever been out of Spain."
"Do you like Paris?"

James Wood's excellent point on sketching characters sparsely ...

Coetzee is always praised for his dignified bleakness, for the "tautness" or carefulness or grim efficiency of his prose, which is certainly good enough to embarrass the superfluous acreage of supposedly richer stylists. But there is a point beyond which pressurized shorthand is no longer an enrichment but an impoverishment, and an unnatural containment. It is the point at which ellipsis becomes a formalism, a kind of aestheticism, in which fiction is no longer presenting complexity but is in fact converting complexity into its own too-certain language. Hemingway at his worst represents one extreme, as when the narrator of A Farewell To Arms sees his dead friend, and tells the reader, bathetically: "He looked very dead. It was raining. I had liked him as well as anyone I ever knew."

The effect of such writing, when passed through the jaded or cynical eyes of the protagonist, is a nullification of what is described. The language simply refuses to extend the consequences of its findings. Among contemporary writers, Robert Stone and Joan Didion straiten themselves in this way; and Coetzee does so, I think, in his new novel. Thus at the simplest level, no one is ever adequately described as simply "tall and wiry ... a thin goatee and an ear-ring ... black leather jacket." This is only the beginning of description, and a prose that treats it as finale is merely servicing its own requirements, rather as, when we find ourselves in a country whose language we barely know, we limit ourselves to what we know we can say, for self-protection.

At such moments, fiction is not open to reality. Instead it is efficiently reproducing its own fictive conventions. One of those conventions is precisely that characters, and characters' bodies, are swiftly describable. Another is that a character can quickly range over the memory of many years, and produce an instant summation. David Lurie is very much this kind of character; all his reflections and memories and thoughts are tightly marshalled in a spare line or two.