Evolution of a Nobel Laureate

In Disgrace, J.M. Coetzee told the story of a disgraced professor whose daughter is impregnated in the course of a gang-rape by three black assailants in South Africa. In Elizabeth Costello, he told the story of an Australian writer who delivers searing lectures on animal rights in which the production of meat is likened to industrial genocide. Now, in Slow Man, Coetzee tells the story of a lonely, crippled photographer who meets a woman named ... Elizabeth Costello.

"A cartoon version of this," writes John Lanchester in the NY Review of Books, "would be to say that Coetzee has moved from a concern about human beings to a concern about animal beings to a concern about fictional beings."