Bought this book for Coetzee alone; must confess I struggle to muster any interest in psychotherapy and Freud at the best of times. A passionate exchange of views on the subject could have changed my mind, but this wasn't that.

The problem is not that they disagree, or even agree, it's that they're having two different conversations - and it makes each of them look bad.

Coetzee comes across, in my view, as finicky and over-theoretical, always bringing it back to semantic philosophizing in the face of patients-in-pain pragmatism. Conversely, Kurtz comes across as over-earnest and cloth-eared, by failing to meet Coetzee's questions on their own terms, but instead giving party-line defences of psychotherapy. The conversation would have been infinitely more interesting if Coetzee had been crueler and more honest from the start, and said that he thinks the whole thing is bunkum (which he clearly does) and if Kurtz had gone harder in her defense of pragmatic health over academic hand-wringing.

That's not to say that there isn't pleasure to be derived from this - there is. But it simply doesn't answer its own exam question. ( )

A Nobel winning author and a practising psychotherapist engage in, what amounts to, an epistolary exchange on a variety of subjects. It sounds like it might be dramatic, a clash of ideologies, a contest of wills, or at least a communal effort to climb a hill. Alas, it is none of these. Coetzee sets the debate on its course and Kurtz consistently and without an ill will misses his points and talks past him. For the reader (some readers) it must look like a dramatization of their own lives. Coetzee is excruciatingly clear, precise in his language, appropriately well versed in both psychological and philosophical literature and anxious to explore the relationship between fiction and truth for individuals and for groups including nation states. Kurtz misunderstands his central points and offers tangential or irrelevant responses. At least that is the way it seemed to me. Coetzee is nonetheless polite and gracious and wouldn’t dream of saying that Kurtz was missing the point. All of which makes me wish he had simply written a book on this subject himself. Because that is the book I’d be interested in reading.

The epistolary exchange as a form has some history. But does it have any future? I kept thinking that if they were limited to the kinds of exchanges that you see in the comments on many website, they would conform to Godwin’s law in which at some point one of them would accuse the other of being a Nazi. Very soon in this book you will begin to imagine what might have taken place if Coetzee had undertaken this exchange with another novelist at his level, or a philosopher, or a whole room full of people other than Kurtz. Or at least someone who listened to what he actually was saying. Sigh.

I really wish this had been a book that I could get behind but as it is — not recommended. ( )