JM Coetzee and Paul Auster are the two of my favourite writers. They are also quite alike in style: both explore the vicissitudes of life, the hardships of being a middle-aged man in the modern world. They write about relationships within families. They document their protagonists' fall from grace (and into disgrace, Coetzee's eponymous novel). They are both very important writers of the Anglophone world, masters of the immaculate, perfectly edited prose.
Yet reading Coetzee, I feel that his writing is more powerful, with more sense of purpose. He is perhaps the only writer I have read who knows the insides of our heads and souls so much better than anyone else and, more importantly, can express them with only a few words. He is a sage, in this respect; it is difficult to baffle him. His prose is not flowery and articulate, but through this disciplined style he holds the reader's heart in his hand.
Auster is more romantic, more mercurial, more prone to digress into sentimental and often not very relevant details - this makes him so similar to Murakami Haruki. His prose is also very well-constructed; I am sure he spends three times as much time editing his texts as writing them. The result is impressive - you can't remove a single word from his texts, so well-organised they are.
Yet I find Coetzee's work more powerful, more gripping and, hence, more important and influential.
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