'Three Stories' by J.M. Coetzee

Three stories, one written as Coetzee's Nobel acceptance speech, interrogate the nature of our relationships with the inanimate (‘A House in Spain’), the casting of our imaginations back into the uncertainties of history (‘Nietverloren’), and the feelings of a narrator towards his writer (‘He and his Man’, in which an autonomous Robinson Crusoe considers ‘his man’ Daniel Defoe as the tables between writer and work are turned (or at least very steeply tilted)).

December 2014