The City Where Coetzee Is God

Photographs by Kent Andreasen When I arrived in Cape Town, South Africa, in October, at the windy end of spring, setting foot on African soil for the first time in my life, it wasn’t to indulge in the animal voyeurism that wealthy newlyweds tell me will change my life. The prospect of being stuck in a jeep watching wildebeest pour through the veld did not intrigue me. Instead, I was on a hunt for traces of one of the world’s strangest writers, J. M. Coetzee, in the city from which he had emerged, a city that he’d intermittently written about—without revealing much of it—and then left, in 2002. The 86-year-old author’s legacy, I’d been told, stirred the kinds of passions that have gone extinct pretty much everywhere else on the planet. Here was my chance to witness not a band of rutting gnu but something I had not imagined could still exist: a communal literary obsession in a postliterary age, at the center of which is a man whom acolytes call, simply, “God.”

I had first encountered Coetzee’s books during my formative years as a writer, in the late ’90s and early aughts. Every second that I wasn’t drinking or abusing drugs or lamely trying to seduce someone or sleeping at a desk job or reworking my first novel, I was reading Toni Morrison, Salman Rushdie, Don DeLillo, a young woman out of London with the chipper name of Zadie—experimental, social-realist, modernist, travelogue, memoir. I probably read at least three books a week, a thought that both inspires and depresses me today. Of course I read Coetzee. Nobody could make you feel as cultured and literary in the space of some 200-odd pages as the stoic and writerly looking man from Cape Town. I read the second of his two Booker Prize–winning novels, Disgrace, when it came out in 1999, at a time when I was experimenting heavily with ketamine, and then went to the back catalog, the novels of the apartheid era, including Waiting for the Barbarians and the other Booker winner, 1983’s Life & Times of Michael K. In 2003, he won the Nobel Prize in Literature—the second South African writer to do so. [From the June 2020 issue: J. M. Coetzee’s unsettling trilogy about a possibly divine boy] I mention the ketamine not to sound au courant, but because the dissociative properties of the drug tracked nicely with what I perceived to be the interior mood and tenor of the novels, or at least of their protagonists. David Lurie, the disgraced literature professor at the center of Disgrace, and the titular Michael K, a simple gardener, are as different as can be in class, education, and race. But as I read their stories, they both felt cut in two: one part of their character acting, suffering, surviving; the other observing from above or below. They are inhabiting and yet also floating through their worlds, untethered to place and people. Many of Coetzee’s characters feel landless; they’ve left home (Disgrace), or are homeless themselves (Michael K ), or have relationships with the homeless that sometimes bleed into a kind of intimacy (Waiting for the Barbarians, Age of Iron). Many of them are swaddled in the privilege of their white skin, yet they yearn for a kind of absolution from the sins of their circumstances (an idea not unfamiliar to the liberal-minded white reader living in Donald Trump’s America). For them, the past is freighted with guilt—a sense, implicit or explicit, that their “presence was grounded in a crime, namely colonial conquest, perpetuated by apartheid,” as Coetzee writes in his 2009 semi-fictional memoir, Summertime, part of a trio he called Scenes From Provincial Life. As for the future: In Coetzee’s pages, it generally promises catastrophe.

Leonardo Cendamo / Getty J. M. Coetzee, 2003

The ketamine sensibility wasn’t all that drew me to him. I am no stranger to writing about dystopia, or to the subject of homelessness; emigration is a loss of home. Coetzee decamped for Australia the year before he won the Nobel Prize. I left my native St. Petersburg at the age of 7, and I dream of it perhaps once a week (given the political situation, a visit isn’t likely anytime soon). I couldn’t help wondering if Coetzee dreams of Cape Town after the sun sets over Adelaide. Somewhere in the novels I read was a moody African city of rainy skies that seemed so different from the cities in the works of Chinua Achebe and Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, and even the Johannesburg of Nadine Gordimer, who won South Africa’s first literature Nobel. Yet Coetzee’s Cape Town was always blurry. A very large mountain, flat-topped like a table, sometimes made its presence known in his pages, but this writer seemed to want to keep the drama internal, or to reach past the particular for the universal parable. I visited the city he left behind because I was curious to figure out what Cape Town may have meant to him, how it might have shaped him, perhaps why he’d moved away. Maybe I wanted to understand a little better the mind of the man floating above the work, more in control of his sentences and his plots, more godlike, in a way, than just about any other writer I had read. And I wanted to discover, too, how he could remain godlike in certain circles—to some a Kafka whose portrayals of alienation gave his once-pariah state a passport to a wider world, to others a false prophet of doom who had abandoned the “Mother City” right when it was starting to prove his dire predictions wrong. I came armed with an essay by my friend Imraan Coovadia, himself a novelist of some note and the head of the creative-writing program at the University of Cape Town. Titled “Coetzee in (and out of) Cape Town,” it appeared a decade and a half ago in a relatively obscure cultural journal in the Philippines, and its sweeping criticisms of Coetzee, painting him as a difficult colleague and his work as socially regressive, had set Cape Town’s literary community on fire. Various friends of Coetzee’s warned me not to trust Coovadia, because he was shunned by most Coetzee scholars, and one of them told me that the writer had been deeply hurt by the essay—the work of a former student, no less. Coetzee had been something like a mentor to Coovadia in the ’90s, when the future apostate was an undergraduate at Harvard and Coetzee was a visiting professor.

Kent Andreasen for The Atlantic Imraan Coovadia, the head of the creative-writing program at the University of Cape Town, roiled the city’s literary community with his essay about Coetzee.

Coovadia’s essay is still shocking to read, and it hasn’t been forgotten in some Capetonian precincts. Coetzee, a writer I had regarded as a distant mystery, a subject of graduate papers and bland prize tributes, comes across as a contentious figure, a politically evasive writer who sought “to insert his own name onto the bookshelves beside Conrad and Dostoyevsky.” He also inspired wild rumors of varying credibility, including the tale that he’d once locked a rival in the trunk of his car. Coovadia doesn’t lend credence to such allegations, and I didn’t have the desire or journalistic wherewithal to investigate them. But I could examine Coetzee’s legacy up close, in the city that lays the greatest claim to him—a backdrop for his dark prophecies of social decay and civil strife that has instead become a cosmopolitan tourist destination, where farm-to-table delicacies, natural splendors, and seaside resorts beckon, but its greatest writer is nowhere to be found. When you see Table Mountain—its scale, its dominance of the sky—everything changes. The mountain’s backside, the one so many Capetonians prefer to its city-facing side because it receives more rainfall and is hence more verdant, commanded the windshield of my taxi on the highway from the airport, just as the road left behind one of the impoverished townships of the surrounding Cape Flats, its corrugated roofs glinting atop informal piles of brick. This strange double vision mirrors so much of Coetzee’s work: poverty close enough to feel, the salvation of nature far in the distance, likely beyond the reach of his morally and often physically struggling characters.

Kent Andreasen for The Atlantic A view of the City Bowl of Cape Town, looking toward Table Mountain

There are cities like Los Angeles, ringed and cut by mountains, and cityscapes that are punctuated by outcroppings such as Rio de Janeiro’s Sugarloaf Mountain, but I have never seen an urban place as thoroughly ensconced within stony promontories as Cape Town. The city lies in an urban bowl surrounded by Table Mountain, by the fearsome Lion’s Head, and by the lion’s posterior, known as Signal Hill; some of Cape Town’s prime beachside real estate crouches beneath the Twelve Apostles, a range of (actually 18) similar peaks. St. Petersburg was built by Peter the Great to make its inhabitants feel small in comparison with the ornate might of its imperial architecture; here, one is cut down to size the moment one looks up and sees a blank cliff face that refuses to stare back, or Table Mountain when it’s covered by a run of wispy clouds that the locals call a “tablecloth.” My companion for the next 10 days, the photographer Kent Andreasen, met me at the Taj Cape Town hotel in the city’s center, about a block away from Parliament, shortly after I’d checked in. We immediately charged up Lion’s Head in the trail-ready Toyota that everyone seemed to drive around there. “Mongoose! Mongoose!” he cried as we nearly ran over said animal. I recalled my childhood love of Rikki-Tikki-Tavi, the mongoose hero of a Kipling story, which had become a popular animated film in the Soviet Union. Throughout my visit, Capetonians kept intimating that although I had finally made it to Africa, I hadn’t really—that their city and most of its inhabitants existed apart from the rest of the continent. The sources of this exceptionalism were both physical and spiritual: first, its rare natural beauty, and second, a (more Coetzeean) sense that it was a remnant that had broken away from some other world entirely and drifted down to the edge of Africa. In the cultural musings of Coetzee’s white characters, that world is Europe—Lurie, for example, spends much of Disgrace planning to write an opera about Lord Byron. And Coetzee took his literary cues from European modernists: Kafka composing his parables; Dostoyevsky shaking his fist at God (or perhaps vice versa); Conrad seeking truth at the edge of empire. For all of the region’s surface attractions, Coetzee’s continental brand of allegorical realism was what put Cape Town, a city closer to Antarctica than to London, on the global literary and intellectual map. Was the author, like the city itself, in Africa but not quite of it? “Cape Town is showing off for you,” Andreasen said as the city below us shone prismatically, the way it never would in a Coetzee novel. The Cape’s notorious wind had decided to take a rest. In the distance, we could see the loading docks of the massive port stocked with colorful Lego—Chinese shipping containers. Closer was something approximating the skyline of a modest Canadian city, the downtown where I was staying. Closer still, the vividly painted buildings of the Bo-Kaap, a neighborhood of mostly Muslim residents of the Cape Malay subgroup. And in the middle of the bay, Robben Island, where Nelson Mandela was imprisoned for nearly two decades, rebuked all of this beauty with history.

Kent Andreasen for The Atlantic Cape Town’s stony beauty is rebuked by history: Beyond Lion’s Head and Signal Hill, the frigid waters of Table Bay surround Robben Island, where Nelson Mandela was imprisoned for nearly two decades. 

Next to a Muslim shrine where we’d paused at the top of the hill, a family of three lay sheltered in the shade of an anemic-looking bush. “You guys want some apples?” Andreasen asked the disheveled patriarch, who shook him off with an explanation for his refusal that could have come from Michael K or Age of Iron: “It’s because I got no teeth.” The rest of the family accepted the fruit. We headed down the other side of the hill toward Camps Bay and instantly found ourselves, visually, at least, in Malibu or Sydney’s Bondi Beach. We passed the street where the current South African president, Cyril Ramaphosa, has a home. White villas, fearsomely armored against intruders, were stacked up and down the hill. Despite the tense security situation—Cape Town’s homicide rate is among the highest in the world—the city has become a magnet for foreigners. Andreasen (who had recently suffered a brutal attack) noted that crime, and the frigid waters (he is, like many residents, a surfer), are all that keep Cape Town from being completely overrun. The Telegraph rated it the best city on Earth in 2025. So did Time Out : “Locals and visitors alike can hang out with a colony of African penguins, taste world-class wines, stroll Blue Flag beaches, enjoy views from atop one of the New 7 Wonders of Nature”—Table Mountain—“and visit one of the world’s coolest neighborhoods, East City, all in one day.” Driving past Camps Bay, we came to Sea Point, a traditionally Jewish neighborhood fronting the beach. Here was my first chance to contrast the scenes of a Coetzee novel with what I could see on the ground. In Michael K, the eponymous character finds himself trying to survive in a civil war. The first part of the novel involves a journey he undertakes with his ill mother, who’s been working as a domestic for a “retired hosiery manufacturer” in Sea Point, which is portrayed as an abandoned shell under martial law. He’s trying to convey her by means of a jury-rigged wheelbarrow to her native Prince Albert, at the southern edge of the semiarid region known as the Karoo, so that she can die peacefully on the land where she was born. Michael K repudiates the feverish world building that pervades a lot of dystopian fiction. The combatants in the civil war are never named, nor is the reason for the war; characters’ races are (as in the rest of Coetzee’s fiction) mostly unspecified. But city landmarks get slipped in, as do racial clues, at least for locals who can recognize them. Michael K wheels his mother “across Beach Road and on to the paved promenade along the seafront,” a quiet scene that later gives way to mob violence on the road. Because his mother is a servant, readers have assumed that they are “Coloured.” (To preempt the American reader’s justified ire: Coloured, in the South African context, refers to most people of mixed-race heritage.) Now I walked down the same paved promenade, past absurdly fit young men engaged in push-up competitions (squint and you’re on Miami’s Ocean Drive), past swimmers’ bodies glinting in gorgeous beachside pools, past housewives speed-walking away the afternoon.

Kent Andreasen for The Atlantic The Sea Point Promenade runs alongside one of Cape Town’s most affluent neighborhoods, an area portrayed as an abandoned shell under martial law in Coetzee’s novel Life & Times of Michael K. 

The incongruity between the grim dystopia that Coetzee conjured and the booming post-apartheid reality of Cape Town is terribly relevant to the way he is perceived, and puzzled over, by South Africans today. Forty years ago, the strangeness of his settings stirred debate too: How to read this lofty writer’s views of his country’s actual anti-apartheid struggles? “The unique and controversial aspect of this work,” Nadine Gordimer wrote in her review of Michael K, “is that while it is implicitly and highly political, Coetzee’s heroes are those who ignore history, not make it.” Admiring his fierce vision of human oppression, she also detected “a revulsion against all political and revolutionary solutions”: Rather than join a band of guerrillas, Michael K, a harelipped loner raised in a state home for the “unfortunate,” sticks to his gardening. Allegory can open many interpretive doors, as it has for Coovadia. In his essay, he cites Michael K as an example of a narrative that speaks to the white South Africans who fled the country in anticipation of a bleak future under Black rule. “You could ask,” Coovadia writes, “whether Coetzee was offering a warning or something which has more the quality of a wish”—a justification for the decision to flee. Bolstering this critique was Coetzee’s own post-apartheid departure. Coovadia’s insider reading, an uncommon one, hadn’t occurred to me. I had imagined the many checkpoints through which Michael K had to pass on his journey as being manned by white soldiers from warring factions. Coetzee, for his part, bridled at hearing his novels “discussed as political statements dressed up as fiction,” he once wrote in a letter; he was frustrated by the failure to read “them as they were written: as accounts of the possible lives of possible people.” In any case, I wondered if Coetzee would argue for his self-exile on moral grounds, as a colonizer whose “presence there was legal but illegitimate,” as a character in Summertime says. “We had an abstract right to be there, a birthright, but the basis of that right was fraudulent.” To which the daughter of Disgrace’s white protagonist, who is gang-raped at her farm, adds: “Why should I be allowed to live here without paying?” Her father himself experiences a harrowing downfall. When the novel came out, half a decade after the euphoria of the 1994 democratic elections in South Africa, its portrayal of a cycle of brutality and resignation as white dominance ebbs fueled yet more debate over Coetzee’s political stance, or the lack of one. By this point, Coetzee was a towering figure at his alma mater, the University of Cape Town, and had been on its faculty since 1972—but he was also an intermittent presence. He was in demand as a visiting professor in the United States, where he’d earned his Ph.D. 30 years earlier, and he traveled a lot. He seemed eager to put some distance between himself and his home. I will mention that the university has a beautifully situated and landscaped campus, its classical buildings draped in a Princeton’s worth of ivy. I discovered this when I dropped in on Coovadia, a tall man with a luftmensch air about him, as if his mind is always processing the unseen and unsaid—not exactly an obvious provocateur type.

Kent Andreasen for The Atlantic Top: The classical buildings of the University of Cape Town. Bottom: A statue of Nelson Mandela stands at the entrance to Robben Island. 

In Disgrace, critics like Coovadia have seen an attempt to vindicate the white South Africans who warned that chaos would fill the power vacuum they were leaving behind. The African National Congress, the ruling party at the time it was published, attacked the novel for promoting racial stereotypes of the country’s Black population. For Coetzee’s acolytes, it can be seen as a parable about how the wages of colonialism spare no group. François Verster, a South African filmmaker at work on a movie about the writer, made the case to me that Coetzee’s avoidance of race and ethnicity is designed precisely to subvert stereotypes—“a refusal to replicate the linguistic terms of apartheid power structures,” much as the absence of scenery defies Europeans’ habit of “reveling in and poeticizing the beauty of the lands they were stealing.” In my first, rapt reading of Disgrace decades ago, perhaps influenced by my history as a child of a failed totalitarian regime, I had felt depleted by the constant, horrific conflict between personal and political choices playing out in its pages. Now I couldn’t help wondering what rereading the novel would be like—how would Coetzee’s vision of a country’s moral core under pressure and its institutions cracking strike an American these days? But I’d get to that later. For the moment, here I was in Cape Town, and I had traces of the writer himself to pursue in places I’d never been—places from which he’d always felt estranged. I arranged to take a trip with a true expert—“the dean of Coetzeeans,” as Coovadia had called him. Hermann Wittenberg is an English professor at the University of the Western Cape, a longtime acquaintance of Coetzee’s, and the editor of J. M. Coetzee: Photographs From Boyhood, a collection of pictures taken by Coetzee as a teenager living in the Cape Town suburb of Plumstead. The chiaroscuro selfie on the book cover—the young Coetzee looking impishly ominous in the shadows—is jarring if you’ve seen Coetzee only on stately novel jackets. It hints at a more playful nature than the one to be found on the page decades later. (Some of Coetzee’s acolytes tried to convince me that in addition to his many other talents, he is a funny writer; they are wrong.) Wittenberg has the grown-up version of the familiar Coetzee mien: slightly bearded, a bit awkward, hopelessly cultured. South Africa’s history, as I’d learned by now, has its share of intrawhite tensions, less warping than oppression along lines of color, but socially salient. According to the rough archetypes that have evolved over the years, the Afrikaners, descendants of the original Dutch settlers, are considered more working-class and blood-and-soil in spirit than the British latecomers, who are portrayed as wealthier, more effete, and less tied in with the politics of apartheid. [From the March 1986 issue: Conor Cruise O’Brien on what can become of South Africa] Once asked what he would call himself, Coetzee answered, “A doubtful Afrikaner, perhaps.” His parents were both of Afrikaner descent, Wittenberg explained, and I knew that a farm in the Karoo, Voëlfontein (“Bird Fountain”), had been passed down by his grandfather to his paternal uncle. But Coetzee’s immediate family was somewhat distanced from that heritage, not least by speaking English at home—and he described himself as feeling particularly ambivalent, starting young. At school, he was more comfortable with the outsiders—Jewish and Catholic kids—than the Afrikaner students and teachers, who feature as bullies in his memoirs. In adulthood, he often seemed ill at ease in conventional social and cultural precincts—a man at the margins of the party. “He can sometimes be difficult to engage with and doesn’t suffer fools lightly,” Wittenberg said. “He may sometimes say abrupt things which don’t allow his interlocutor to save face. He has the strength of cutting right to the core, but for some people, this can sometimes feel antagonizing.” I thought of Coetzee’s own gloss on his adolescent self in the interview included in the photo book. As a budding photographer, he’d been “interested in being present at the moment when truth revealed itself, a moment which one half discovered but also half created,” he told Wittenberg. At the same time, he recognized that he wasn’t attuned “to other people’s experience. I was too wrapped up in myself, which was not unusual at that age.” In Boyhood, another of Coetzee’s semi-fictional memoirs of provincial life, the young protagonist longs to be a “normal boy,” yet he also proudly stands apart from peers, whom he considers crude Afrikaners. Nearly everyone I talked with, admirers of Coetzee or not, emphasized a kind of emotional remoteness. In Summertime, a former lover describes the Coetzee stand-in this way: “In his lovemaking I now think there was an autistic quality. I offer this not as a criticism but a diagnosis, if it interests you. The autistic type treats other people as automata, mysterious automata.” In my conversations, a startling number of people quietly speculated about Coetzee perhaps being on the spectrum, and his fans sometimes spoke of him as a godly invalid or, if you want to go full Dostoyevsky, a holy fool. By this point in our tour, you won’t be surprised to learn that Coetzee’s family story is an unsettled one—and that the places where he grew up have changed. His father held an assortment of jobs, and, despite having a law degree, he ran into legal trouble along the way (among other things, he embezzled trust funds). The Coetzee family “was marginally middle-class,” Wittenberg said as we headed for Plumstead, where the downwardly mobile arc of his boyhood landed him before he left home. “That’s why he had the ambition to succeed,” Wittenberg said, “and why he’s always been careful with money.” We stopped by the Catholic school that Coetzee attended before university— a “last resort” for those shut out of the fancier private schools for the English elite. From there, Wittenberg drove us to where the Coetzees lived at the time, explaining that it had then been very close to a Coloured area, with halal shops and a mosque; he pointed out the “cheap postwar housing.” What I could see of the Coetzee house, mostly obscured behind a sturdy-looking gate and fencing, reminded me of the kind of anonymous place my family lived in a few years after arriving in America; I suppose one could call it lower-middle-class but striving mightily. Coetzee had practiced cricket here, while his emotionally inaccessible father drank himself into oblivion. In one of the photos that the young Coetzee took, his mother stands out front, a slight smile on her face, a dog in her arms—a snapshot of homey rootedness, in sharp focus: exactly what’s left out of his fiction. On our drive, I brought up the way the entire region tends to hide in the deep background in Coetzee’s work. Wittenberg told me that Coetzee applies a kind of filter to the stunning landscapes provided by the city and its environs. He cited a character in Coetzee’s 1986 novel, Foe, an author who muses on “a ripple in the glass” as he gazes out of an attic window. This sense of a “distortion in the visual field” is key, Wittenberg said, to Coetzee’s “complicated realism.” Any strand of joy that a character happens to catch comes from deep within his mind, and is connected mostly to the intellect, sometimes to love, or, on rarer occasions—reaching across the divides drawn by colonialism and apartheid—to an understanding of another human. For Coetzee the outsider, fiction dwelled in the interior. Four years before the Coetzees settled in Plumstead, the family interrupted their suburban existence and left the city behind. The preteen Coetzee was miserable when the family moved to Worcester, not far from where the Karoo starts. “After an hour outdoors there is a fine red dust in one’s hair, in one’s ears, on one’s tongue,” he wrote in Boyhood. “Worcester is only ninety miles from Cape Town, yet everything is worse here.” It was hard to say no to a ringing endorsement like that. So one early morning, I set off to visit this part of Coetzee’s past, joined by Andreasen and Coovadia. (Lest one think of Coovadia as a thoroughgoing Coetzee antagonist, he did tell me at one point that his former teacher “is still the greatest living South African writer.”) The drive up to the Karoo was as beautiful as one could hope. Every few minutes, a new stage set presented itself: landscapes of increasing aridity backed by mountain ranges that fanned out into eternity, or poked up into ochre skylines, or presented as what the locals call a “witch’s hat.” If a small dinosaur instead of the customary baboon had dashed across the road, I would not have been surprised. We stopped by a traditional padstal, a rural roadside farm stall crowded with kitschy examples of what Wittenberg had called “Boer chic”—wooden plows and the like. Dozens of farmers had gathered there for lunch, many in T-shirts that stretched over their monstrous torsos and celebrated various kinds of tactical weapons. I ate a springbok carpaccio that tasted silky with blood (this would not end well for me on a gastric level). Before hitting Worcester, we took a detour: Andreasen drove us to the so-called Gateway to the Karoo, the railroad town of Touws River, which he had been photographing for a project. We passed all forms of cinematic desolation: abandoned schools, sad-looking liquor stores (“Boredom in South Africa means drinking,” Andreasen said), salvaged train seats piled up on people’s porches. “This is the poorest town I’ve ever been in,” Coovadia said, although as a former Soviet I found the alcoholic vibe familiar: It felt like Russia with sun.

Kent Andreasen for The Atlantic The author in Worcester, 90 miles from Cape Town, where Coetzee lived as a preteen and a memorial plaque now honors his literary contributions 

We circled back to Worcester, which, after the poverty of Touws River, appeared to be a veritable Palm Springs, the main street bustling with coffee shops and wealth managers, though the dismal place that Coetzee described was not thoroughly transformed. The house he lived in is now a one-story ranch with a garage and a corrugated roof with a skylight. An old white man, aided by a walker, was ambling over to a woman next door as barefoot kids ran down the street and a dog barked and whined. (The boy in Boyhood stands out for always wearing shoes.) We rang the doorbell; no one answered. But the view! Every time Coetzee left his Boyhood home, he’d be greeted by a mountain range—perhaps minor by Western Cape standards, but terribly impressive by anyone else’s—that towered above the humble homes. A park in front of his house only heightened its grandeur. How did that not make it into Coetzee’s work? Then again, postcard vistas are not selling points in novels about the core of existence—any more than a gift for mingling is to be expected from their author. Later in the week, Coovadia threw a braai, or barbecue, at his grand but lovingly cluttered home in the suburbs, with an Afrikaner minding the lamb, which was charred to perfection and perhaps even tastier than its New Zealand counterpart. The expert griller presented me with a book in Afrikaans that traced 300 years of the Coetzee family’s lineage in South Africa; he himself, he told me, was distantly related to the writer. A friend of Coovadia’s, a woman of South Asian heritage, recalled her time at the University of Cape Town when Coetzee taught there. She mentioned, not without some pride, that her “ex-husband sold a bicycle to him”—and that “lots of people I fell in love with were Coetzeean fanatics.” It was she who told me that whereas foreign students addressed him as John, “South African students referred to him as ‘God.’ ” I thought of how many parties and braais must have taken place in Cape Town’s southern suburbs over the years, in academic households such as this one, with the conversations focusing on Coetzee; some, perhaps, on his actual work, others on his aloofness, his love interests, his bicycles. In his essay, Coovadia writes that in the decades after apartheid, Coetzee became more than a writer to a contingent of Cape Town intellectuals. He became a religion, which made their African outpost a kind of mecca. As my time in the city drew to a close, Andreasen and I rushed around town on a scavenger hunt, list in hand of stray lines from Coetzee’s novels that mentioned Cape Town’s particulars. I began to realize that Coetzee hadn’t been as unaware as I’d thought of the fact that he lived in one of the world’s most beautiful places. “Cape Town,” Lurie reflects in Disgrace, “a city prodigal of beauty, of beauties.” Scenes crop up of sad seductions and near intimacies: His characters stare down from a height at one of the beaches below or struggle through a harborside meal in a picturesque suburb like Hout Bay. And, yes, as Lurie says during a class lecture in Disgrace, climbing up Table Mountain can lead to “one of those revelatory, Wordsworthian moments we have all heard about.” [From the May 2024 issue: Gary Shteyngart cries himself to sleep on the biggest cruise ship ever] Before I left the city, I met the author Justin Fox, a half Afrikaner who traveled along the route taken by Michael K for his book Place: South African Literary Journeys. “So many South African writers are bred of the Karoo, this ancient landscape where dinosaurs roamed,” he told me at an L.A.-style casual restaurant by the waterfront, a kind of anti-Karoo. “My English roots are only 150 years old, but my Afrikaner roots are 300 years old, so the pull is deeper, and so I think it is for Coetzee.” In a public conversation last year in the Netherlands, Coetzee said that as he was “nearing the end,” he felt more and more like an imposter when he spoke English: “I am a lighter—a more lighthearted—and a better person in Afrikaans.” It might seem a strange thing to say, considering the leading role Afrikaners played during apartheid, and if Boyhood is to be believed, the young Coetzee had been panicked at the prospect of being consigned to classes taught in Afrikaans at school. I grew up speaking Russian and reading the classics in that language; now, given its political uses in the atrocities perpetrated in Ukraine, I shudder every time I have to speak in the tongue of Pushkin. Yet Coetzee’s homecoming to his parents’ language might well be a sign of his needing to reconcile with his origins, no matter how complicated they are. “He has mentioned that he wants his ashes scattered on the grounds of his family farm,” Fox told me. Does this mean that God in fact intends to return, if only in death? Fox couldn’t say: “I’ve known him for 50 years, but I’ve never known him, because, in a way, he’s unknowable.”

Travel Notes Leo’s Wine Bar A hipster district has formed along Bree Street, at the edge of downtown and at the foot of the colorful Bo-Kaap. Leo’s, which serves bagels by day (under the name Max Bagels) and wines and snacks by night, felt spunky and cool and diverse, a little bit like Brooklyn before my generation destroyed it. I ate slices of organic raw-milk cheese from the Karoo, and drank a cold glass of grenache gris from a nearby region. Matthew, the young owner, grew up in Plumstead, and was happy I was on Coetzee’s trail. “He’s very deliberate,” Matthew said of the author. “He doesn’t use words unnecessarily. I think he’ll go down as one of the greats.” To further extend the Brooklyn analogy, Matthew gave me a collection of his own poems, which proved not half bad.

Shop 28, De Oude Schuur, 120 Bree St, Cape Town, 8001, South Africa

ANTHM This Japanese-inspired cocktail joint reminded me of one of the best bars that New York City has ever known, Angel’s Share, which was sadly forced to leave its longtime East Village home in 2022 before relocating further west. I thought I recognized ANTHM’s owner; naturally, he had worked at Angel’s Share, and had brought an approximation of its sophisticated drink menu to Cape Town.

63 Loop St, Cape Town City Centre, Cape Town, 8000, South Africa

Bodega Ramen Situated in a former mortuary just off Bree Street, Bodega Ramen served the best version of karaage, or Japanese fried chicken, that I have had outside Japan. The Gin Bar, downstairs, has a cocktail menu of “house remedies” that promise to cure you of a variety of modern ailments: pessimism, depression, heartache, jealousy. My favorite, The Ambition, will finally rid you of impulse buying, arrogance, and “big car” syndrome.

64A Wale St, CBD, Cape Town, 8001, South Africa

Giovanni’s Deliworld Adjacent to Jewish Sea Point, this classic deli features ancient machers with golden Chai symbols around their necks still making deals over coffee and sandwiches. Despite much of its clientele, Giovanni’s, as you may have guessed, is not a Kosher establishment. I had no objections; the prosciutto del capo made my morning.

103 Main Rd, Green Point, Cape Town, 8051, South Africa

Table Mountain Because you’ve spent half the day looking up at it, you might as well take the cable car to the top. In fact you really should, because this might be the most transcendent urban view on the planet, one that even hundreds of chattering tourists can’t spoil.

5821 Tafelberg Rd, Table Mountain (Nature Reserve), Cape Town, 8001, South Africa

South Yeaster Bakery In the picture-perfect suburb of Hout Bay, on the south side of Table Mountain’s enormous nature preserve, is the kind of happy seaside place I imagine you can find in Coetzee’s new Australian homeland, but I bet this one is much, much better. The kimchi-and-Gruberg-cheese croissant shouldn’t work, but it does. The sandwiches, which make liberal use of local cheese, crème fraȋche, arugula, and focaccia, inspire awe.

4 The Promenade, Hout Bay, Cape Town, 7806, South Africa

This article appears in the April 2026 print edition with the headline “The City Where Coetzee Is God.” When you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.