These three late stories by Coetzee capture him in his elegant prose of poise as he explores ownership and love in the narrator's changing relation with his transnational Spanish house in 'A House in Spain', half-mourns and half-celebrates the passing away of an old pastoral economy in 'Nietverloren' and delves into an epistolary dialogue with his alter-ego as an asymptotic treasure trove of stories which can neither end nor go on in 'He and his man'.
The anonymous reflections of three undefined narrators in the three stories create a melancholic refuge for the self that feels old and odd in a rapidly changing world. Reading these stories is like reading a series of very personal diary entries that are so private that they become impersonal.
The house in Spain acts like a memorial for the self, facing mortality while the small patch of barren land around the old world farm house in South Africa awaits inscriptions on its surface, never to return in the passage of time and the letters from 'he' to 'his man' and vice versa trace a difficult relationship, suspended half way between proximity and distance.
Each of the three brief stories, the third one being the most complexly layered, is a meditation on impossible relationships between the human subject and the non-human world of in-animate houses, lands and letters.
JM Coetzee's humanity is inflected by their in-humanity.
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