Gideon Haigh

‘So, what are you working on?’ ‘My book, The Office.’ ‘Still?’ ‘Yup.’ (Pause.) This is a memoir about writing – about how deeply you can grow to detest it. From a purveyor of nonfiction, this might come as a surprise. It’s the novelists and the poets with the inner lives and the psychic wounds, right? […]

In his latest book, Summertime, J.M. Coetzee continues his recent metafictional experimentations by positing an alternative self, the late John Coetzee, as a biographical subject. Critics have dwelt at fascinated length on the disfigurement to which Coetzee submits himself: his fictional alter ego is an unvarnished misanthrope, a sexual cipher. Yet the biographer, known simply […]

Everybody wants to go to heaven, as they say, but nobody wants to die. So it is in the world of book reviewing. Everyone is in favour of frank and fearless criticism, up to the point where a work of theirs might come off the worse for it. It was, arguably, ever thus. But the […]