The Master of Petersburg

The Master of Petersburg (published 1994) is a Novel by John Maxwell Coetzee,J M Coetzee a South African and Australian novelist, essayist, linguist, translator and recipient of the 2003 Nobel Prize in Literature

Quotes

• ‘if you do not kill you are not taken seriously’
  • page 195

• Yet he cannot stop, his eyes move restlessly from one passing figure to the next, searching for the set of the shoudlers, the tilt to the walk, that belong to his lost son. By his walk he will recognize him: first the walk, then the form
  • page 49.

• Like the mythical Orpheus who traveled to the underworld in an attempt to coax Eurydice ‘out of the entrails of hell’, ‘walking backwards step by step, whispering the dead woman’s name’, Dostoevsky would like to resurrect his son. He is ‘trying to cast a spell. But over whom: over a ghost or over himself?’
  • Page 5

• He is in a rage with everyone who is alive when his child is dead. In a rage most of all against this girl, whom for her very meekness he would like to tear limb from limb.
  • Page 16

• No one kills himself, Matryosha. You can put your life in danger but you cannot actually kill yourself. It is more likely that Pavel put himself at risk, to see whether God loved him enough to save him.
• Page 75

• Am the very one who died and was buried... Pavel the one who lives and will always live’
  • Page 124.

• Not only old, but a ghost, an angry, abandoned spirit’
  • Page 116

• An old man in a corner with nothing to do but to pick over the pages of his losses’
  • Page 124.

• ‘an old, blinkered horse going round and round in a circle, rolling out the same old story day after day’
  • Page 186

• ‘famished children waiting for the angel of death’
  • Page 180.

• What of me, what of my place in your utopia?’ (
  • Page 185

• ‘a man of gifts, a man of special insight’ (
  • Page 45

• He is not a god but he is no longer human either. He is in some sense, beyond the human, beyond man. **Pages ** Page 242.

• ‘if you do not kill you are not taken seriously’ (
  • page 195

• A bald man with the tubby figure of a peasant woman’ and pale lashes, ‘like a cat’s’
  • Page 31

External Links

https://books.openedition.org/pulm/11068?lang=en