I believe this to be Coetzee's most complex and ambitious project in fiction, yet. The connections between the three different parts of the text on each page (really the intricate relationships between the scholarly-writerly voice, the novelist-protagonist's voice, and Anya's) 'performs' the tensions between the private and the political. My unease about the splitting disappeared on the third page and the narrative drew me in and I was plunged headlong into the development of the story. The multiply self-reflexive ways in which the narrative explores the role of writing in a world of love and politics (themselves inextricably connected) is encapsulated in the brief chapter ('opinion') on Harold Pinter. I've been recommending this book to everyone I know who is also concerned with being human in these troubled times we are being made to live in.