Here’s an extract from Coetzee’s forthcoming novel, Diary of a Bad Year, and published in The New York Review of Books:
Every account of the origins of the state starts from the premise that “we”—not we the readers but some generic we so wide as to exclude no one—participate in its coming into being. But the fact is that the only “we” we know—ourselves and the people close to us—are born into the state; and our forebears too were born into the state as far back as we can trace. The state is always there before we are.
Continue reading at NYRB.
And here’s a critical review of the book by Adam Mars-Jones.
Groundwork 