Dusklands.

COETZEE, J.M.

Item Number: 2516

Johannesburg: Raven Press, 1974.

First edition of the Nobel Prize-winning author’s first book. Octavo, original cloth. Signed by J.M. Coetzee on the title page. Near fine in a near fine dust jacket with just a touch of rubbing to the extremities. A very sharp example.

Dusklands is a pair of novellas in the tradition of Conrad's Heart of Darkness. The first novella "Dusklands" probes the links between the powerful and the powerless. The second novella "Vietnam Project" is narrated by a researcher investigating the effectiveness of United States propaganda and psychological warfare in Vietnam. The question of power is also explored in "The Narrative of Jacobus Coetzee," the story of an eighteenth-century Boer frontiersman who vows revenge on the Hottentot natives because they have failed to treat him with the respect that he thinks a white man deserves.