The Special Child
The Atlantic|June 2020
In his unsettling trilogy about a possibly divine boy, J. M. Coetzee asks how we recognize the truth when it enters the world.
By William Deresiewicz
The Special Child

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.

This story is from the June 2020 edition of The Atlantic.

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This story is from the June 2020 edition of The Atlantic.

Start your 7-day Magzter GOLD free trial to access thousands of curated premium stories, and 9,000+ magazines and newspapers.