REVIEWS
A seductive tale of failed communication
JM Coetzee is a great writer, perhaps one of the greatest still around. His success is all the more extraordinary for the sheer uncanniness of his prose, the sparsely elegant feeling of obsession and neurosis that we take from his characters. That sense of the irrational and borderline absurd edges the superb writing in
, a new short story now published together in a collection. This is Coetzee at his most lugubrious and beguiling: if it turns out to