AustLit

'Place in J.M. Coetzee's writing is seldom just home, in any comfortable sense, nor is there the process of re-familiarization that one finds in so much postcolonial writing that answers metropolitan representations of colonial space. On the contrary, place in Coetzee is a site of epistemological dualisms, of failed self/other relationships, of incommensurability, of aesthetic destruction: "too much truth for art to hold" (Doubling 99). Intimacy and detachment, in equal measure, in Coetzee's relationship with South Africa: that is the dynamic I wish to explore in this essay.' (p.229)