Rian Malan’s one and only meeting with J.M. Coetzee took place in the early 1990s. Malan greatly esteemed his fellow South African writer, and when Coetzee won the Nobel Prize in 2003, he declared that the laureate had “described, more truly than any other, what it was to be white and conscious in the face of apartheid’s stupidities and cruelties.” But what had struck Malan when he came face-to-face with Coetzee was, as he told The New Statesman in 1999, his asceticism. Coetzee was “a man of almost monkish self-discipline and dedication. He does not drink, smoke or eat meat. He cycles vast distances to keep fit and spends at least an hour at his writing-desk each morning, seven days a week. A colleague who has worked with him for more than a decade claims to have seen him laugh just once.”

The writer is always a result of the man. With Coetzee, this intensity of focus and denial of his own ego have allowed him to create characters whose internal conflicts are perfectly attuned to those of white South Africa. From Waiting for the Barbarians to Disgrace, his novels are complex allegories in which psychology is presented not in its messy, everyday incarnation, but under the intense magnification of the author’s microscope. His protagonists are invented for the specific purpose of illustrating a moral crisis.

I’m not saying that Coetzee’s characters are representational stick figures. But they don’t seem like people you would sit down with to drink a beer. Rian Malan, on the other hand, does seem like such a person—you might take a drag from his cigarette, too. Yet his moral crisis was no less acute than Coetzee’s. And in his only book, My Traitor’s Heart, published just as the drama of apartheid’s final demolition was...

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