As he passed his 70th birthday, J. M. Coetzee— South African–born Nobel laure ate, twotime winner of the Booker Prize, among the greatest living writers in the English language— embarked on a highly atypical series of works. His previous 14 novels, all shorter than 300 pages, pos sessed a spare, compressed intensity of lan guage and design. Now he has completed a trilogy— The Childhood of Jesus, The Schooldays of Jesus, and finally The Death of Jesus—that sprawls to more than 750. It is ruminative, meandering, and openended. Its prose is flat; its mood is often slack. It is strange, enigmatic, unsettling. And oddest of all, it is not about Jesus.
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