As long as one character speaks, Coetzee's masterful style is on display. But when there is dialogue between investigator and interviewee, the contrivance becomes all too evident: There is no real exchange and no discernable setting.

Now we have Summertime, the third in Coetzee's ongoing volumes of more or less fictionalised memoir that began with Boyhood, continued with Youth and are subtitled Scenes from Provincial Life.

These volumes are not to be taken as literal truth, a fact underlined by the way in Summertime one John Coetzee, a famous Nobel prize-winning novelist, is dead and an Englishman who never met him is attempting to write a biography of him on the basis of interviews with a number of women who had an effect on his development.

The last part of the book is made up of extracts from his journal entries focused on his ageing and ailing father, who appears intermittently in the preceding pages as a frail and constricting figure. The account of the father has, in a way nothing else in this book does, an overwhelming poignancy.

Much of this weird book is a meditation on the absurdity of the fame that is the surface noise of a hypothetical immortality. Then there's the grief that throws it all away and in doing so throws it into high relief.

Who is JM Coetzee? In one sense the answer is obvious: world-famous novelist and writer, twice winner of the Man Booker, winner of the Nobel prize for literature. But in another sense “JM Coetzee” is a persona created by the author, especially in his ­volumes of “fictionalised memoir”. The first of these, Boyhood, describes the character’s upbringing in the 1940s and 1950s on a bleak housing estate east of Cape Town. Top of his class yet fearing failure, he is gawky, unsocial and eccentric. The second, Youth, ­follows his glum fortunes in the early 1960s through a wet, foggy London, where, “dull and ordinary”, he nurtures dreams of ­artistic triumph while toiling as an IBM programmer. Literary success, he believes, will be linked with success as a lover, once he encounters the “Destined One”: the woman to inspire him. But his ­sexual entanglements, though surprisingly frequent, prove messy, sordid, embarrassing or boring. He is not, it seems, “built for fun”.

Now the third volume of the ­trilogy, Summertime, focuses on his return to South Africa, covering 1972 to 1977 when he was “finding his feet as a writer”. Like Boyhood and Youth, it refers to “Coetzee” in the third person (“He is the product of a damaged childhood”), thus distancing the autobiographical element. But it adds a startling new dimension of literary artifice: the deployment of a postmortem biographer. For Coetzee, we learn, has died in Australia. An English researcher, Vincent, who never met him, is interviewing five figures crucial to his life in the years when he started to publish. Four of them are women, including two former lovers. Supposed transcripts of their interviews make up most of the book. The rest ­comprises extracts, real or invented, from Coetzee’s contemporary ­notebooks.