Next up: Orwell

Warning: this will be biased since I have only read J.M. Coetzee's 'Diary of a Bad Year' while I have read most of Orhan Pamuk's English-language titles.

The Essayist is a strange phenomenon in this day and age where the columnist and the social commentator appearing on our TV/computer screens dominate the scene for 'expert' opinion. Even the Blogger can have some sort of influence in an increasingly crowded market of visible opinions.

But in the form of J.M. Coetzee's 'Diary of a Bad Year' and Orhan Pamuk's 'Other Colors', we have two collections of essays of the highest order. Although their styles are vastly different, the commentaries on daily life, both trivial and sombre issues, and higher philosophical machinations combine in a way that we cannot not be influenced by their words.

In the red corner: arguably Turkey's finest writer, Orhan Pamuk 

Let us take Orhan Pamuk's 'Other Colors'. His is an honest voice, observational but undoubtedly a masculine one. Having come from a comfortable background, he seems to be confident in his sentimality and integrity; an unabashed social commentator who has (inadvertantly) found his own Western-facing political tone. Occasionally he will veer into the vulgar masking a deliberate playfulness, but his essays are solely his own. Writing about his daughter Ruya, this is a man who is comfortable with family life and more generally, with the wider pubic in essence.

In the blue corner: J.M. Coetzee - an authentic voice spanning the British colonial diaspora

J.M. Coetzee's publication undoubtedly has a very different format with his short essays accompanied by a story running on the bottom half of the page with two narrative voices, one being a writer closely resembling himself, and another being Anya, a young woman who becomes his typist. His political landscape centres on South Africa, the US and Australia but what is more distinctive is his apologetic, almost guilt-ful tone. Perhaps coming from the shame that manifests itself from a voice inflicted by post-colonial/apartheid white-man's retrospection, this reflects Coetzee's public persona as a reclusive professor type with 'monkish' self-discipline. By having a separate story which comments on his opinions written on the top half of the page, the writer - which is Coetzee in his different guises - is so apprehensive and unsure of his opinions that doubt creeps into the reader about what would ordinarily be 'high-minded' opinions. There is a deliberate self-consciousness about the writer which transposes onto the reader, which suggests this is still the genre of fiction - just.

I hope publishers continue to publish essays like these, because the essay format threatens to be the most truthful and revealing way of showing one or more sides to one's public persona. As they are both Nobel winners, it is obvious that their essays command some respect; but writing fiction with imagination and writing essays with insight are two very different things.

Next on my list are the essays of George Orwell. How will his voice compare to the two mentioned here?