Bookslut | The Bad Luck of Samuel Menashe. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
... in a sense, his entire work is a rejection of the values that make a good career seem valuable. The focus on the old themes of death, transience, nature, and God indicated a mind that knew that literature needs a better motive than reputation. (As a Coetzee character says, "Books are not immortal. The entire globe on which we stand is going to be sucked into the sun and burnt to a cinder.") Actually, Menashe told us what his motive was: he had no motive. Or, no rational one. He tells us that when he was twenty-three, he went to sleep one night never having written a poem; in the middle of the night, he woke up and began writing in verse. He might as well have been describing the transformations of puberty.
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