The audiobook plot, as always with Coetzee, is twisted and dizzying: it’s the story of the collapse of the life of a successful professor at the University of Cape Town. By getting involved with his student, he loses his job, his friends, his place in society. His daughter, who is subjected to violence by aboriginal Black people, and the professor’s own opera that he invents about Byron and his Italian beloved—the one the main character identifies with…