SOURCE: "To Be Conscious Is to Suffer," in New York Times Book Review, November 29, 1994, p. 9.

In the following review, McGrath finds The Master of Petersburg "dense and difficult, a novel that frustrates at every turn," but a worthy addition to Coetzee's canon.

A ferociously bleak sense of human isolation has characterized the work of the South African writer J. M. Coetzee. In each of his novels he has created figures who stand starkly silhouetted against a vast, harsh landscape and an equally harsh political system; they are belittled and dehumanized by both. His prime concern has been with survival, spiritual and physical, the scraping of meaning and sustenance from the most hostile of environments. There is no comfort to be had from this experience; for Mr. Coetzee's characters, to be conscious is to suffer.

That theme is Dostoyevskian, and in his strong, strange seventh novel, The Master of...