Canepari-Labib is in Coetzee’s cheer squad. She sets out to refute all those critics who have said he is insufficiently politically engaged. According to Canepari-Labib, Coetzee has spent his whole writing career ‘denouncing’ this and that – the Vietnam war, ‘the obliterations enacted by colonialism’, even Western society as a whole. At the same time, everything he has written is taken as a metaphor for South Africa. The book was finished before Slow Man (2005) appeared, but I imagine she would manage to amputate its toes to make it fit her glass slipper, given the chance.

Some of the opinions she ascribes to Coetzee are extraordinary. Can he possibly ‘acknowledge that language is the only means human beings have at their disposal for communication’? She gives no reference, so I assume this is supposition. As for ‘denunciation’ (the word appears continually in its various forms), it has never been Coetzee’s game. Her approach, though well meaning, serves Coetzee poorly, reducing his magnificently ambiguous and subtle oeuvre to a series of partisan tracts.

It is ironic how Canepari-Labib consistently rubbishes the ‘Western philosophical tradition’, while accepting unquestioningly everything written by Foucault, Barthes and company: she seems unable to think for herself. This book is a perfect example of the way the dead hand of theory can stifle the lively art of criticism.