Over at The Monthly, J.M. Coetzee and Arabella Kurtz elaborate on stringing a good yarn:
What ties one to the real world is, finally, death. One can make up stories about oneself to one’s heart’s content, but one is not free to make up the ending. The ending has to be death: it is the only ending one can seriously believe in. What an irony then that to anchor oneself in a sea of fictions one should have to rely on death!
But Coetzee isn’t always so morbid: Kurtz quizzes him on the truth in psychoanalysis, Don Quixote, and social revisionism in Australia and Germany.
