![]() Really, however, she wants to pursue the title question-how should a person be?-which has preoccupied her since the collapse of her marriage. Subtitled “a novel from life,” its avatar-protagonist Sheila begins tape-recording conversations with her friends in the hope of inspiring dialogue for a play. Sheila Heti’s How Should a Person Be? (2010) re-treads this ground on a sunnier day. The only question to resolve is its flavor. If we are to write, betrayal is inevitable. ![]() The book is hence a kind of postmodern stitch-up in which Coetzee indicts himself and draws us into a maze with no discernable exit. Coetzee in turn exploits Dostoevsky, and the novel’s moral question is yet more pointed when we learn that his own son died in a climbing accident. “They pay him lots of money for writing books,” thinks Dostoevsky, the words reportedly spoken by his dead son Pavel, whom he is about to betray by taking up his pen. What is more, an author can never be neutral on this matter. ![]() They receive nothing, yet are stripped of autonomy and transformed into a literary type. What does it mean to exploit one’s life in one’s writing? It is also to exploit the lives of others-of friends, lovers and family-who are inevitably reduced and distorted in a written work. Coetzee’s The Master of Petersburg (1994), a fictive Dostoevsky ponders the question of writing as betrayal. ![]()
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