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Published May 2020
208 pages
Genre: Literary Fiction
Publication Information
After The Childhood of Jesus and The Schooldays of Jesus, the Nobel prize-winning author completes his haunting trilogy with a new masterwork, The Death of Jesus.
In Estrella, David has grown to be a tall ten-year-old who is a natural at soccer, and loves kicking a ball around with his friends. His father Simón and Bolívar the dog usually watch while his mother Inés now works in a fashion boutique. David still asks many questions, challenging his parents, and any authority figure in his life. In dancing class at the Academy of Music he dances as he chooses. He refuses to do sums and will not read any books except Don Quixote.
One day Julio Fabricante, the director of a nearby orphanage, invites David and his friends to form a proper soccer team. David decides he will leave Simón and Inés to live with Julio, but before long he succumbs to a mysterious illness. In The Death of Jesus, J. M. Coetzee continues to explore the meaning of a world empty of memory but brimming with questions.
"Though a veritable house of interpretative mirrors, as many of Coetzee's novels are, this one points readers to a less cerebral, more visceral intimacy with the losses it contemplates." - Booklist (starred review)
"Coetzee's simple, clean prose is guided by philosophical questions, and Simon's humanistic reflections provide a thrilling contrast to David's bumpy journey of faith and acceptance of his mortality. This is an ambitious and satisfying conclusion." - Publishers Weekly
"Coetzee's tone is flat and matter-of-fact throughout, and the book feels slightly underdone, with several unanswered questions—the most central of them that message, at which we can only guess. For Coetzee completists, though not up to masterworks like Waiting for the Barbarians and Life & Times of Michael K." - Kirkus Reviews
"Anything J.M. Coetzee writes deserves our full attention...The Death of Jesus is full of truth, irreducible, tearfully moving to read." - Evening Standard (UK)
"Any new novel from Coetzee commands respect, and the final part of the trilogy is no exception...The Death of Jesus constantly challenges what we believe and why." - Mail on Sunday (UK)
"The Death of Jesus is fiction of an order that dazzles the mind and leaves the heart questing and reaching out for the power and profundity of what is at some remote level a restatement, even if it is a bewildering one, of what we traditionally think of as the greatest story ever told." - The Sydney Morning Herald
This information about The Death of Jesus was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
J.M. Coetzee's work includes Waiting for the Barbarians, Life & Times of Michael K, Boyhood, Youth, Disgrace, Summertime, The Childhood of Jesus and, most recently, The Schooldays of Jesus. He was the first author to win the Booker Prize twice and was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2003.
Name Pronunciation
J.M. Coetzee: kuut-SEE (different pronunciations can be found, but this is how Coetzee himself pronounces it)
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