The Afterlife of Coetzee’s Secular Commedia
Nobel Prize-winning J.M. Coetzee’s new novel, The Pole, is an uneasy secularization of Dante’s love for Beatrice, his beatific muse. If Christopher Beha is correct and “the novelist . . . is a person for whom secularism presents a problem,” the disgrace and dis-ease Coetzee captures so gracefully put him