Books like Dusklands by J. M. Coetzee

J.M. Coetzee’s first published fiction is presented in the collection Dusklands, which contains two novellas written in the first person. The first, *The Vietnam Project*, follows a mythographer tasked by the United States Department of Defense to craft psychological colonization strategies against the Vietnamese during the early 1970s. The second, *The Narrative of Jacobus Coetzee*, is Coetzee’s own translation from Afrikaans of a 1760 expedition by Boer settlers and Hottentot servants in their hunt for an elephant, in which they encounter the Namaqua people. Together the stories engage in a dialogue about the colonizer’s role in history, the ethics of captivity, and the relationship between writer and text, with Coetzee confronting his own complicity. Dusklands is a dense, intellectually demanding debut that rewards close reading and reflection on the processes of colonization and historical narrative.

First publish date: 1974