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J. M. Coetzee

A Writer’s Life: J. M. Coetzee’s Elizabeth Costello

No preliminary explanation, no introduction to prepare us for this clearly fictional statement, couched in the third-person present tense familiar from The Master of Petersburg (his most recent novel at the time), and for those of us who thought this might be the familiar lecturer's strategy of beginning with a quotation from another author, no break in the fictional tissue from henceforward to the end of the presentation.