Coetzee attempts the rather tricky business here of using a real-life person as his protagonist--the Russian author Dostoevsky--and the even trickier business of writing in the real-life style of his character. And I would say he succeeds, because I am left depressed and disturbed, as I was left after reading Dostoevsky's The Possessed. Quite an accomplishment for Coetzee; quite a downer for me.
The Master of Petersburg takes place in 1869 when Dostoevsky returns from exile in Germany because his stepson Pavel has committed suicide (or perhaps been murdered). As he peers into the life that Pavel has led in St. Petersburg, Dostoevsky is drawn into the lives of his stepson's landlady and her young daughter and into the intrigues of a group of political terrorists, led by the immoral Nechaev. Finding the answer to the mystery of his stepson's death, however, becomes secondary to a confrontation with his own "demons" and ambivalent feelings about the nature of love, political rebellion, and the purpose of writing.
I am glad this was not the first Coetzee book I ever read; if it had been I would have stopped here and never read Disgrace or Waiting for the Barbarians. The language is wonderful, the execution is clever, the ideas are thought provoking, the tone is suitably dark and drear--what's not to like? Well, it left me feeling that human relationships and political systems are so basically flawed that there is just no fixing them. And I don't like to feel that way.
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