The Wounded Animal: J. M. Coetzee & the Difficulty of Reality in Literature & Philosophy Book

The last sentence of this book is where everything just comes together, since Mulhall sometimes gets a little lost in summarizing and philosophically situating Coetzee's work:

"For it is only a Kafkaesque realism such as Coetzee's that can hope to convey an accurate impression of the various difficulties of reality, and willing to put in question any prevailing philosophical conventions concerning that enterprise that appear at present to block or subvert its progress, including the convention that philosophical realism is no more literature's business than literary realism is any concern of philosophy's—will be capable of being properly, genuinely impressed by Coetzee's achievement."

In light of claims such as this, Mulhall makes good on Diamond's generous blurb on the back of the book: his project ambitiously argues that philosophical conceptions of what is 'real' or 'true'—and perhaps philosophical thinking more generally—can be changed in a way that is modeled after the change of those terms in the arts, specifically literature, brought about by modernism in the 20th century.