I just received a copy—via ILL, on microfilm, from Johannesburg—of an opinion piece on Disgrace from the Sowetan (by Aggrey Klaaste, 3 April 2000, p. 9). It’s one that I had seen referenced in a couple of places, but had never before been able to read. Nothing of interest as literary criticism, but it’s a potentially useful fragment of documentation concerning the novel’s initial political reception in South Africa. If you’re interested, I’ve put up a marginal-quality PDF copy (what can I say, it’s a scan of a printout from microfilm.)

Also: The fact that it took two months to get a hold of this article—and that there were many more that were simply unobtainable at a major U.S. research university with a diligent ILL department—illustrates part of the problem with doing politically and culturally informed work on Coetzee outside South Africa. It’s certainly not impossible, and I don’t mean to overplay the difficulty, but the primary sources are much trickier to track down than I expected them to be.

Also also: Microfilm apparently still exists.