J. M. Coetzee is probably the only Nobel Prize winner for Literature with a degree from UT. He spent several years in Austin in the 1960's, playing intramural cricket, protesting the Vietnam War in the pages of the Daily Texan, and writing a dissertation on Sam Beckett’s novels. A few years later, he returned to South Africa, the country of his birth, and started writing one amazing book after another. He hasn’t really stopped since then. He’s visited Austin a few times since then, including a stint in 1995 as a visiting professor at UT.

Recently, he’s living abroad again—this time in Australia, possibly because of political differences with the current South African government. He’s an old man now, already having achieved the highest possible honor for a writer. The major subject of his career, the apartheid state, now feels about as timely as James Bond's anti-communist adventures. In response, Coetzee has turned to autobiography and semi-autobiography, always with a strong layer of artifice involved. Diary of a Bad Year, his latest, continues the trend—the book is presented as a work of fiction, but the main character’s name is John C, and he’s the author of a book called Waiting for the Barbarians (one of Coetzee’s most famous novels, which was turned into an opera here last spring.)

In Diary of a Bad Year, John C has been contracted by a German publisher to compile his thoughts on the state of the world—subjects including the War on Terror, intelligent design, tourism, torture, and avian flu. These “Strong Opinions” make up a good part of the book. They’re interesting, but frankly they’re a little stale. We’ve all had to listen to artists we respect go on about Bush and Cheney and the decline of Western Civilization. Even when we know they’re right, we eventually want to tell them to shut up, stop shooting fish in a barrel, and get back to what they’re really good at--making art.

Coetzee is one step ahead of us. Each page is divided into two, then three sections, horizontally. On top are the “Strong Opinions.” Underneath, he introduces a private story of John C—one morning in the laundry room of his apartment building, a hot young thing in a short dress walks in. The old man becomes obsessed with the woman, named Anya, and when he finds a moment to speak with her alone, he offers her a job typing up his manuscript. Thus Coetzee manages to undermine his own preachiness before we get a chance to. It’s all an act to get him closer to Anya, and maybe even to pry her away from the investment banker she lives with.

Soon Anya’s voice enters the story as well, in a third section of each page. Then things start to get a little crazy. Anya’s boyfriend launches a scheme to steal Mr. C’s money, Anya starts to sympathize with the pathetic old intellectual, and the lower part of the book becomes as fixated on sex and desire as the upper part is on Bush and Blair.

We’ve never seen a book work quite this way, and it’s exciting. Sure, there are flaws—Anya’s character is a bit one-dimensional, and presenting her in the first person might have been a mistake. Still, it’s a mistake Coetzee owns up to in his way, in one of his “Opinions.” While holding forth on the state of literature, he writes:

“I read the work of other writers, read the passages of dense description they have with care and labour composed with the purpose of evoking imaginary spectacles before the inner eye, and my heart sinks. I was never much good at evocation of the real, and have even less stomach for the task now. The truth is, I have never taken much pleasure in the visible world, don’t feel with much conviction the urge to recreate it in words.

Growing detachment from the world is of course the experience of many writers as they grow older…. The syndrome is usually ascribed to a waning of creative power; it is no doubt connected with the attenuation of physical powers, above all the power of desire. Yet from the inside the same development may bear a quite different interpretation: as a liberation, a clearing of the mind to take on more important tasks.”

Especially after his Nobel, Coetzee seems to want to take novel writing in a radically different direction. He’s lost interest in real stories, and wants to find other ways to express his inner life and the universal inner life of the outsiders he tends to write about. Diary may not be his masterpiece—earlier works like Barbarians, Life and Times of Michael K, and Age of Iron make for stiff competition—but it is a significant and interesting addition to an endlessly rewarding body of work. Coetzee is like a maze you could walk around in for years and never get tired of. Diary is one last promising cul-de-sac, and even if he never quite finds his way out of it, it’s much more than a dead end.