Probably no Nobel laureate of any nationality or period knows more about the functioning of language than JM Coetzee.

Few if any of those honoured for literature are as well versed in mathematics or as academically competent. On returning to South Africa after alternately gloomy and turbulent sojourns in the UK and US, Coetzee applied for a teaching job at the University of Cape Town, citing as his specialisms general linguistics, modern grammatical theory and the structure of English.

He had already written theses on Ford Madox Ford and Samuel Beckett, and had first pioneered and then abandoned a form of statistical analysis for literary texts which drew on a period working (unhappily) for IBM and a facility, unusual for the time, with computers. He had also made translations from Dutch and dabbled in poetry. Fiction did not seem to be on his mind and indeed his first reference to what became his first novel spoke of a potential contribution to "African studies".

All this, coupled with a vanishingly quiet personality and sober ways (he was and remains an abstainer) has led to a certain view of Coetzee as remotely cosmopolitan, an algebraist rather than a social moralist, a cool and rather emotionless person who unlike the previous South African winner, Nadine Gordimer, seemed to stand apart from debate about his native country.

One not untypical critic says of Coetzee that, in dealing with his work, personal biography is largely irrelevant. But this seems absurd or borderline perverse given the nature of the work, where fiction and "African studies" blur in the very first book. Dusklands, from 1974, is the twinned story of an unhappy researcher in psychological warfare finessing new techniques for Vietnam and The Narrative Of Jacobus Coetzee, a transcribed and "translated" 18th-century document by a namesake (forebear?), describing early exploration of the African interior. Later, Coetzee was to write thinly disguised autobiographical fiction in the third person. Youth recreates his own childhood, and in Summertime, a fictional biographer comes to interview a French lecturer at the University of Cape Town about the deceased writer JM Coetzee.

There are many threads here, and a deep stratum of personal pain, but it is language that lies beneath and behind all of it. Coetzee has said that all reading is translation and all translation a form of literary criticism. He writes in English but remembers a childhood in which no conversation lacked an Afrikaans word, and no Afrikaans conversation failed to dip into English. He was drawn to Ford and Beckett for the same tension between ancient and modern registers, and the tension between Beckett's "native" but colonial English and his adopted French.

Coetzee's aim, from Dusklands onwards, has been not so much to "translate" the old myths of arrival and colonisation as rid them of successive rationalisations. He told the BBC: "The old stories of discovery and exploration were in some sense written over much darker stories which have thus been obliterated so that going back to the past becomes a matter of recovering what was covered up." He has said that his underlying mission is to discover "whose fault I am".

This is powerful, and from a man who lost a father to drink and dishonesty and then a son to fatal accident (with the shadow of suicide), it is almost unbearably poignant. Coetzee has inhabited many places: an itinerant life with an impoverished mother, then London, Surrey, Texas and upstate New York, where at SUNY-Buffalo he was arrested following a peaceful academic protest against American involvement in Vietnam, or more strictly against a stand-in university president's brutal handling of student protest.

He is now a citizen of Australia. But in some sense he finds all other places wanting. It may be possible to love many women, and one often senses this withdrawn man struggling to discover what it means to love another, but it is only possible to love one place in a lifetime. The only landscape etched in his mind is the empty space of the Karoo and the once wildly beautiful Cape. Everything else is a phenotype. Africa is his archetype. He needs to register its "unflinchingness" and its "forgivingness".

Whatever his apparent subject, his subject is almost always himself, whether the reimagined son of the imagined SJ Coetzee, or feminised as Elizabeth Costello in the 2003 novel of that name, or hidden behind affected simplicity in The Life And Times Of Michael K (a book that announces itself as biography but has an idiot for subject); he's there, too, objectified and fictionalised in Youth and Summertime, and already deceased and ready for summing-up in the latter of those. Where is John Coetzee in the work? Nowhere or everywhere?

There is a fine and final irony to all this, and a sad one in that Coetzee's first biographer has not outlived his subject. JC Kannemeyer, an expert on South African and Afrikaans literature, died on Christmas Day 2010. It is almost possible, given that circumstance, past history and the near-coincidence of initials that this fine book is itself a fiction, dictated by JM Coetzee, who is academically astute enough to have prepared all those footnotes, hiding, as the novelist always must, in plain sight. Because hiding is revelation.

JM Coetzee: A Life In Writing

JC Kannemeyer

translated by Michiel Heyns

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