By J.M. Coetzee (Viking, $25.95)

Coetzee has been working since Elizabeth Costello or earlier to Trollope the contemporary novel so hard it'll knock the jade right out of our eyes. If anything was lacking from those efforts it was exactly what Coetzee finds here: the bravery, the damned gall, to place his fictional self at the center of the thing and wound it, himself, over and over again as he cuts away at the corpus of the book and the form. It's too good, this book, too ambitious to be bloodless.