I BEGAN TO hate JM Coetzee during the month I spent in his archives.

It was January 2015 and the archives were still relatively recently opened, acquired in 2012 by the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin. Other scholars who had visited were abuzz with enthusiasm. They talked about the archives in reverent tones, as though they contained the key to the great man’s writing. I knew already that I did not have the proper attitude to work seriously on Coetzee. At conferences, I was embarrassed and somewhat scandalised by the appeals to greatness. I had always been ambivalent about his writing, which I was working on not because I thought it expressed any particular genius (a concept of which I had always been taught to be sceptical), but, rather mundanely, because it supplemented the two other writers I had studied in my doctoral-­thesis-­turned-­first-­book.