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And did you find yourself in the book?

No.

Were you upset?

What do you mean – was I upset not to find myself in his book?

Were you upset to find yourself excluded from his imaginative universe?

No. It was part of my education. Shall we leave it at that? I think I have given you enough.

Well, I am certainly grateful to you. But, Mme Denoël, let me make one further appeal. Coetzee was never a popular writer. By that I do not simply mean that his books did not sell well. I also mean that the public never took him to their collective heart. There was an image of him in the public realm as a cold and supercilious intellectual, an image he did nothing to dispel. Indeed one might even say he encouraged it.

Now, I don't believe that image does him justice. The conversations I have had with people who knew him well reveal a very different person – not necessarily a warmer person, but someone more uncertain of himself, more confused, more human, if I can use that word.

I wonder if you would be prepared to comment on the human side of him. I value what you have said about his politics, but are there any more personal stories from your time together that you would be prepared to share?

Stories that will reveal him in a warmer light, you mean? Stories of his kindness toward animals – animals and women? No, those stories I will be saving for my own memoirs.

[Laughter.]

All right, I will tell you one story. It may not seem personal, it may again seem to be political, but you must remember, in those days politics pushed its way into everything.

A journalist from Libération, the French newspaper, came on an assignment to South Africa, and asked whether I could set up an interview with John. I went back to John and persuaded him to accept: I told him Libération was a good paper, I told him French journalists were not like South African journalists, they would never arrive for an interview unprepared. And this was of course in the days before the Internet, so journalists could not simply copy their stories one from another.

We held the interview in my office on the campus. I thought I would assist in case there were language problems, John's French was not good.

Well, it soon became clear that the journalist was not interested in John himself but in what John could tell him about Brey-ten Breytenbach, who was at the time in trouble with the South African authorities. Because in France there was a lively interest in Breytenbach – he was a romantic figure, he had lived in France for many years, he had connections in the French intellectual world.

John's response was that he could not help: he had read Breytenbach but that was all, he did not know him personally, had never even met him. All of which was true.

But the journalist, who was used to literary life in France, where everything is so much more incestuous, would not believe him. Why would one writer refuse to comment on another writer from the same little tribe, the Afrikaner tribe, unless there was some personal grudge between them, or some political animosity?

So he kept pressing John, and John kept trying to explain how hard it was for an outsider to appreciate Breytenbach's standing as an Afrikaans poet, since his poetry was so deeply rooted in the volksmond, the language of the people.

'Are you referring to his dialect poems?' said the journalist. And then, when John failed to understand, he remarked, very disparagingly, 'Surely one cannot write great poetry in dialect.'

That remark really angered John. But, since his way of being angry was, rather than raising his voice, to turn cold and withdraw into silence, the man from Libération was simply confused. He had no idea of what was going on.

Afterwards, when John had left, I tried to explain that Afrikaners became very emotional when their language was insulted, that Breytenbach would probably have responded in the