Coetzee's vision made a sharp, original commentary on the South Africa of apartheid, but it also explored the human condition with a bleak, dispassionate sympathy that many readers have found unforgettable.
In this dystopian future, the reader finds the dispassionate college professor Dr. Theo Faron, a cousin of the Warden, as he joins a small cohort of subversives in opposition to the unelected dictator.
This last book is not so much a biography as a portrait of an age and a milieu, both now disappeared; it is told with a dispassionate affection familiar to all readers of Fitzgerald's fiction.
But a reader looking for a dispassionate history will have the sense of being yanked into a single tree after happily contemplating the forest.
My only concern in this adventure is dispassionate evaluation; my only colleagues are readers who turn to The Times for their news, expect it to be fair, honest and complete, and are willing to trust another such reader -- me -- as their surrogate.
It's a dispassionate approach which refrains from bludgeoning the reader into any pre-determined position: was Ransome a traitor, a conscientious peace-broker or merely, in Lenin's phrase, a useful idiot?
Sure, it's important to have carefully argued, dispassionate analysis but I want to hear the voice of The Sun reader, the saloon bar, the Millwall terrace and the smart middle-class dinner party.
His is a dispassionate, number-crunching approach that is short on drama for the casual reader but packed with hard evidence for those trying to take the measure of China's business environment.Consider this seemingly straightforward question, central to any discussion of state capitalism: how large is China's private sector?
That's not to say it's dispassionate; indeed, despite what I wrote above, I agree with one of our readers, Wendy Breuer, who called the book a "cri de coeur" — it feels powered by a cold fury, what another reader, Mauro Javier Cardenas, terms Bolaño's "rage at the fate of the unfortunates".
She manages to stay rather dispassionate about the stories she hears and this in turn makes it easier for the reader to stay untouched.
