“He was, but his agent persuaded him not to take it. She thought he could do better. After the success of the first book, she was going to put the second one up for auction and make a killing. The big writers never accept multi-book contracts. They sell each new book to the highest bidder and flog the translation rights and foreign country rights as separate deals. No two-for-the-price-of-one for them.”

I still find this hard to believe. It is impossible to overstate how big a splash Coetzee’s book made when it first came out. Before he went into hiding, he was lionised by the literati in a way that made Salman Rushdie look like small fry.

Articles were written about him in The New York Times—in Granta, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, The Times, The Guardian, the Independent, The Atlantic, even Rolling Stone. People would pay good money to read his laundry list, never mind his next novel.

Moira shrugs. “I’m only telling you what I hear. His agent has screwed up big-time. When the offers for the second novel weren’t as high as she hoped, she took it off the market and started writing to various publishers personally. But everyone knew it had failed to sell at auction, so they started low-balling her. And you know what publishing is like. Everybody knows everybody, and they all talk to each other. So, Publisher A heard that Publisher B had turned it down, and made an even lower offer.”

I smile. Moira’s assumption that she and I “know what publishing is like” is based on our experience of the minuscule world of South African academic publishing. Could we extrapolate from that and assume that the billion-dollar transatlantic publishing industry works in the same way?

Perhaps we could.

In academia, it is reputational death to have one’s article turned down by too many journals. Word gets around and nobody wants to touch your piece, even if the original reason for turning it down was simply that it wasn’t a good fit for a particular journal. Editors fear association with your untouchable article.

“Coetzee’s new book has the cheese touch,” Moira says. “He’s the Greg Heffley of literary fiction.”

Now I know she is exaggerating. Coetzee’s reputation as the man who wrote the book of the century can’t have died that quickly.

“What about the Australians? If he’s living there now, aren’t they eager to claim him as their own?”

“They are, but his agent won’t let him look at their offers. It would be too much of a climb-down to give his second book to an Australian publisher. Besides, they pay peanuts compared to the Americans and the British.”