Michael Wood writes:

It does seem that the more Coetzee’s novels make use of the essay form the more his essays settle into a straight and sober version of the genre. A 1999 piece on Musil, for example, included in Stranger Shores (2001), opens: ‘Born in the autumn years of the Habsburg Empire, Robert Musil served His Imperial and Royal Majesty in one bloody continental convulsion and died halfway through the even worse convulsion that followed.’ A Musil piece in Inner Workings, which takes up some material from the earlier essay verbatim, starts: ‘Robert Musil was born in 1880 in Klagenfurt in the Austrian province of Carinthia.’ No-nonsense stuff, and this is often Coetzee’s method in this collection: some solid biography, a plain man’s discussion of a particular work (‘What is his book “about”?’), and, where relevant, some attentive and intelligent comment on different translations. As Derek Attridge says in his preface, ‘we have little sense of a moonlighting novelist: there are few literary flourishes, and no sign of that rather grumpy internal voice that has characterised much of Coetzee’s recent fiction.’

(LRB 4 October 2007)

Harvill | hardback 304 pp. |ISBN: 9781846550454