Abstract
Dominic Head's new book on J. M. Coetzee is compact, useful, and in many ways original. Like all the previous full-length studies of Coetzee's [End Page 214] work, this text presents readings of the novels in a chronological sequence, with a chapter devoted to each novel: a format determined, in this case, by the aims of the Cambridge series, which requires an overview of each author's entire oeuvre. However, Head's work (while occasionally dry to read) is more than a critical exercise or primer. While his focus is largely on Coetzee's novels (up to and including The Master of Petersburg), Head sets the fiction in dialogue with Coetzee's critical essays--both those collected in Doubling the Point and the more recent ones gathered together in Giving Offense. The connections he makes are frequently inventive (as, for instance, when he uses Coetzee's essay on Breyten Breytenbach to illuminate the treatment of confession and dialogue in The Master of Petersburg).
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