Diary of a Bad Year
By J.M. Coetzee
Harvill Secker £16.99, 304 pages
FT bookshop: £13.59

The initials of the narrator of Diary of a Bad Year are “J.C.”. Like J.M. Coetzee, he is a South African who emigrated to Australia; also like the novelist, he has published a collection of essays on censorship and a novel called Waiting for the Barbarians. As we imagine Coetzee himself to be, the narrator is a literate, sceptical scholar in his late middle age, a little solitary, a little regretful. But to ask whether the narrator is, in fact, Coetzee himself is to broach one of the central themes of all of Coetzee’s fiction: the relationship between truths and stories, between ideas and desires, between what we think and what we have.