Interview with John Coetzee, South African writer (in a hotel room in downtown Cape Town and on Diaz Beach, South Africa). Coetzee talks about the complexity and meaning of beauty, aesthetics, marriage, authorship and the solace of writing, South Africa and the cruelty of the Apartheid system, human suffering, the solace of nature, his childhood, perfectionism, music, the flora and fauna of Diaz Beach, conservation, silence, innocence, discomfort, art, language, self-knowledge, his conception of heaven, the afterlife and death. Coetzee reads from his own work in the hotel room.