READY FOR HIS CLOSE-UP

It should come as no surprise that Nobel Peace Prize laureate Shirin Ebadi would say in her acceptance speech that 9/11 has been exploited by the U.S. government as an excuse to violate international law and human rights.

So let's have a look instead at J.M.Coetzee's Nobel Lecture. The self-effacing Nobel Prize laureate in literature doesn't give interviews. He regards himself as a private person, not a public man. He's a literary man. So literary apparently, that his lecture takes the form of a tale about Robinson Crusoe upon his return to England 26 years after he was shipwrecked on a deserted island.

He finds no joy in society, having grown used to solitude. ... He does not read, he has lost the taste for it; but the writing of his adventures has put him in the habit of writing, it is a pleasant enough recreation.

The plague and other nasty developments are uppermost in his mind. When Crusoe strolls along Bristol's harbor wall, he wonders "what species of man can it be who will dash so busily hither and thither across the kingdom, from one spectacle of death to another (clubbings, beheadings), sending in report after report?"

Crusoe imagines himself a business man, prosperous at first but then ruined by a natural disaster: The Thames overflows and floods his warehouse. He must flee his creditors, ending up in disguise in Beggars Lane under a false name. At the same time, the contagion of the Black Death is inescapable. "Some London-folk continue to go about their business, thinking they are healthy and will be passed over. But secretly they have the plague in their blood: when the infection reaches their heart they fall dead upon the spot. ..."

By the end of the lecture, however, Coetzee has turned his grim tale, a sort of parable of our time, into a reflexive allegory of authorship. Crusoe recalls how difficult it was to master the art of writing and how he eventually did, even to the point of glibness. But now "that old ease of composition has, alas, deserted him. ... [H]is hand feels as clumsy and the pen as foreign an instrument as ever before."

Crusoe wonders whether "the other one" -- presumably Daniel Defoe, author of "Robinson Crusoe" and "A Journal of the Plague Year" -- still finds writing easy. The tales "of ducks and machines of death and London under the plague" -- with which the lecture itself begins -- "flow prettily enough."

Perhaps he misjudges him, that dapper little man with the quick step and the mole upon his chin. Perhaps at this very moment he sits alone in a hired room somewhere in this wide kingdom dipping the pen and dipping it again, full of doubts and hesitations and second thoughts.

Crusoe wonders whether he'll ever meet this other man but "fears there will be no meeting, not in this life" and imagines the both of them as "deckhands toiling in the rigging" of two passing ships "close enough to hail." But in rough seas and stormy weather, with "their eyes lashed by the spray, their hands burned by the cordage, they pass each other by, too busy even to wave."

It's an oddly wistful conclusion to a jagged, difficult story. Until then it seemed the opposite of sentimental. The most interesting thing perhaps is that the lecture is all the interviews he never gives, a sort of self-examination of a writer in conflict with himself and with the world. The strangest thing is that he has such nostalgia.