Gary Shteyngart’s essay “The City Where Coetzee Is God” which appeared in the March issue of the Atlantic magazine, traces a deeply reflective journey to Cape Town, where the author seeks not tourist pleasures but the lingering presence of Nobel laureate J. M. Coetzee. In the city that shaped him, Coetzee appears almost mythic—revered, debated, and elusive—while his novels like Disgrace and Life & Times of Michael K continue to probe themes of alienation, colonial guilt, and moral ambiguity. Shteyngart is struck by a central tension: the stark, dystopian landscapes of Coetzee’s fiction seem at odds with the vibrant, cosmopolitan Cape Town he encounters. This dissonance raises compelling questions about whether Coetzee’s vision is prophetic, exaggerated, or allegorical. As the essay unfolds, themes of exile and displacement come to the fore, especially in light of Coetzee’s departure from South Africa, suggesting both an ethical unease and a complex relationship with history. Situating Coetzee alongside writers like Nadine Gordimer and Chinua Achebe, Shteyngart highlights how his inward, allegorical style diverges from more socially grounded narratives. Through conversations with academics and locals, the author uncovers a portrait of Coetzee as distant yet profoundly influential, a writer whose work resists simple interpretation. Ultimately, the journey becomes a kind of literary scavenger hunt across landscapes like the Karoo, where reality and fiction blur, and geography gives way to interiority. The essay concludes that Coetzee, much like Cape Town itself, exists in a space between beauty and unease, making his work less a mirror of reality than a meditation on its deepest ethical and existential tensions.
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/2026/04/coetzee-cape-town-apartheid/686067/
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