How long does it take to read Dusklands?
Dusklands by J. M. Coetzee takes about 2 hours 38 minutes to read at 250 words a minute.
About 2 hours 38 minutes
An evening's read
First published 1974. 144 pages, about 39,600 words.
6 days at 30 minutes a day
Estimate based on 275 words per page.
At other speeds
| Slow, 150 words a minute | 4 hours 24 minutes |
| Average, 250 words a minute | 2 hours 38 minutes |
| Fast, 400 words a minute | 1 hour 39 minutes |
The page count is the median across 11 editions, so your copy may differ. How we calculate.
About the book
J. M. Coetzee's first published fiction includes two novellas. The Vietnam Project is a five–part, first–person story of a mythographer (mythmaker) working for the United States Department of Defense whose job is to write an essay for his overseer Coetzee detailing psychological colonization strategies to deploy against the Vietnamese during the early 1970s. At the other end is The Narrative of Jacobus Coetzee, author Coetzee's "integral" translation from Afrikaans of a Boer settler and six Hottentot servants' elephant–hunting expedition in 1760 and their contact with the Namaqua people. The latter is also written in the first person. Together, both narratives share a dialogue about the affected colonizer in the process of colonization, the (re)writing of history, the ethics of captivity, and relationship between the writer and the written, namely author Coetzee's grappling with the idea of complicity. On the whole, Dusklands is a fierce debut that demands close reading and intellectual reckoning.
Subjects: Fiction, novella, myth, Fiction, general, Fiction, psychological, South africa, fiction
