Her voice is soft and full of succor

And there was something more: Coetzee seemed so dubious about the possibilities of language-as-communication, preferring instead to consider words as a species of music (cf. Disgrace and Foe for articulations of this properly Viconian idea), that Diana wondered whether she should not give up writing. After finding out, two years after meeting Daniel, that he would support her, she had wondered whether she should not simply content herself with the animal sufficiency of their life together, and abandon writing. Really: why write? Speak of the darkest matters, and still you have only produced a decoration for a comfortable room. Adorno said it long ago, when domiciled in LA: even Kafka’s books have become so much furniture.

Diana finds herself thinking again what she has thought before: she should be an activist, not a writer. The thought is never serious. Still, she does not see that it avails anything to write highbrow book chat. Her reviews communicate nothing, convince people of nothing. They are a talented girl’s brittle recital, more or less pleasant on the ear. Sometimes people offer that she writes well; never do they say she has induced them to think.

"[...] I love In the Heart of the Country, which I suppose a reviewer would describe as a metafictional novel narrated by an ageing white virgin in a remote corner of South Africa. It’s the best book I know about hysteria and also one of the best metafictions, nor is this a coincidence: metafiction is hysteria, it’s a feeling that you have not made contact with the world, that you do not know your dimensions, that you don’t know what sound you will make on contact with the

Diana laughs to herself at her ineffectuality and at the parlous state of the world

Really everyone who wins the Nobel Prize does seem overrated. Is this the best anyone can do? you wonder. Note to self, she thinks: Don’t win Nobel Prize. So far there is little danger. Three months ago she sent out her best short story to five publications; the result to date is two perfunctory rejections. Meanwhile she is at work on a novel—that is what she tells Daniel and her parents. It would be truer to say that the idea of the novel simply follows her wherever she goes. It is one of her skills to be able to describe how other novelists sound. But she doesn’t for the life of her know what her own fiction should sound like; that is the missing timbre for which she is constantly listening, the unknown tune to which her ears are pricked up. How much easier it would be to write a pastiche of Coetzee! But that is not how to do it. The way to write is not as if you have just learned the craft, at the school of the masters; the way to write is as if you have somehow always known how.

(I initially noticed this reversal in our cheval glass reflection—her lucubratory loft was otherwise bare).