Image: Museum of Latin American Art of Buenos Aires
The Museum of Latin American Art of Buenos Aires, through its Department of Literature, has published two essay volumes by J.M. Coetzee that are now being discussed in a review that places the South African writer’s criticism, reading practice and political stance at the center of attention. The books are 'Companions in Travel: Essays on My Personal Library' and 'Love and Marriage in Sigmund Freud and Other Essays', both presented as finely produced editions issued by MALBA’s literature department.
The review describes Coetzee, at 86, as an author whose essays reaffirm a resistance to capitalism and to forms of domination that displace identities, extract resources and silence voices. Rather than treating the books as isolated literary exercises, the text frames them as part of a sustained intellectual method in which Coetzee reads closely, revisits neglected authors and turns literary criticism into a vehicle for moral and philosophical inquiry. In that sense, the two volumes are presented as extensions of a broader body of work that moves between literature and philosophy.
'Companions in Travel' is described as a book built around Coetzee’s “personal library,” and the review singles out the writers Robert Walser and Franz Kafka as especially important to his thinking. It also notes a wider constellation of authors included in the volume, among them Hawthorne, von Kleist, Musil, Flaubert, Tolstoy, Defoe, Rilke, Pound, Stevens, Cavafy, Neruda, Brodsky, Herbert, Enzensberger, Oswald, Eliot, Ginsberg, Wordsworth, Hölderlin, Baudelaire, White, Madox Ford and Samuel Beckett. The article argues that Coetzee approaches these writers obliquely and laterally, sometimes through a single work and sometimes through an entire oeuvre.
The second volume, 'Love and Marriage in Sigmund Freud and Other Essays', is presented as the more expansive of the two in its range of literary and philosophical concerns. The review focuses on Coetzee’s reading of Freud, Martha Bernays and the nature of love, marriage and desire, while also linking the essay to his autobiographical writing, especially 'Childhood'. It notes Coetzee’s engagement with Freud’s correspondence with Romain Rolland and with ideas around mysticism, as well as the writer’s use of classical references, including Aristotle and Plato, to probe the tensions between attachment, separation and illusion.
The review also highlights the “other essays” gathered in the book, which range from Jack London’s photography and the politics of representation to Behrouz Boochani and Australian migration policy. Other figures discussed include Zbigniew Herbert, whose work is read as an oppositional stance against domination, and Amos Tutuola, whose use of English and reception in Nigeria are treated as central to debates about language, colonialism and literary legitimacy. In each case, the essays are presented as combining literary analysis with social and political attention.
The article’s closing emphasis is on Coetzee’s decision, in these recent years, to have his first editions appear in Spanish, a choice the review reads as a statement against the hegemony of his mother tongue as an instrument of colonization. The two MALBA-published essay books are thus framed as part of a larger critical project: one in which Coetzee returns to books, writers and ideas that remain essential to his understanding of suffering, resistance, love and identity.
