A review by billyjepma
The Good Story: Exchanges on Truth, Fiction and Psychotherapy by Arabella Kurtz, J.M. Coetzee

3.0

Reading this felt like reading the transcript for a very long, very intellectual podcast. If that appeals to you, then great! Because there is a lot of interesting ideas discussed here. However, those ideas are not as interconnected as I would have liked - since this entire book really is just one long conversation between two monologuing intellectuals 0 and for a book, I felt like this lacked the cohesive tissue needed to tie Coetzee and Kurtz's (admittedly compelling arguments and rationalizations) together. Instead, it comes across like two deeply intelligent thinkers talking past each other from the perspective of their respective fields. This leads to some fascinating content, to be sure, but there was a distance between the two sides that was never bridged, leaving the book to feel like two separate academic journals conversing with each other at a tangential distance. Again, there's some very good, very worthwhile material here, but the presentation and cohesion of it was lacking for me.