Lesbians are like that because they're fat.
The novel may not inherently be a dialectical form, but readers are so used to a synthesising process that they may detect one without help from the author. J.M. Coetzee's quietly deceptive new novel exploits this reflex, with a narrative that belongs to two opposite types simultaneously, revealing its true allegiance only on the last page - in fact the last sentence. David Lurie, a divorced university professor in his fifties, leaves Cape Town in disgrace to stay with his daughter Lucy on her smallholding in the Eastern Cape. What follows is somehow simultaneously a story of redemption and of collapse, just as a famous optical illusion is simultaneously a duck and a rabbit, but can only be seen at any one moment as one or the other. The reading mind responds to the possibilities in disconcerting alternation.