The Good Story - J.M. Coetzee

J.M. Coetzee’s new book The Good Story is a meditative dialogue with psychoanalyst Arabella Kurtz that draws on the concepts of psychoanalysis in order to elucidate literary fiction. The dialogue is informal and wide-ranging—moving from Don Quixote to prayer to Apartheid to youth gangs. Coetzee and Kurtz are at their finest when analyzing the act of confession in Dostoevsky and in analyzing the relationship of the individual to history in W.G. Sebald’s novel Austerlitz. The work is ambitious—always in pursuit of the question: What are the stories that we tell ourselves, and what does that say about us as human beings?