Hilary Mantel on Coetzee’s new novel, Diary of a Bad Year, in the NYRB:

… The stage in life is reached when a writer of fiction is no longer content to show off to others, but needs to engage with personal and urgent questions of his own: how to live, how to die. But because of who he is, he must work them out in the public realm, on the page. If he is also a commentator on society and politics, he must consider whether his opinions—which anyway are “subject to fluctuations of mood”—have degenerated into a licensed grouchiness, into a simple complaint that the world has not lived up to his fantasies of how it should be. He is faced with the need to question and renew his attitudes, at the same time as he is tempted to give way to … “soft opinions.” He wants to consider his dream-life. He has an attraction, perhaps for this writer always there, to “the way of quietism, of willed obscurity, of inner emigration.”

Coetzee has written a great deal about the perplexities, shifts, and accommodations of a writer’s life, but never so cogently as in Diary of a Bad Year. Under some regimes—the old Soviet Union, South Africa under apartheid—all working writers can claim to be heroes. Accidents of birth have cut them a slice of moral grandeur, theirs for nothing as soon as they take up the pen. Committed to seriousness, and bound either to emigration or delicate evasion of the censor, they need perhaps feel no obligation to entertain. Reading them has become a moral duty for the bien-pensant. Coetzee, as one of these distinguished few, has employed his special status skeptically. He has employed irony, allegory, indirection, and yet he knows his duty: often, as in Disgrace, which many readers think his greatest work, moral analysis hangs heavy from every line. The Diary, by contrast—and in great contrast to Coetzee’s last novel, Slow Man—is nimble, at times frisky, as it keeps its reader’s attention on the move, above and below and between the lines, in and out of different frames of reference.

More here.