This book The Work of J.M. Coetzee is double-edged. It has a life of its own and takes over from works already written, modifying their scope and meaning. For example, the emblematic Robinson Crusoe, by Daniel Defoe, is re-narrated in Foe, a novel by the South African Nobel Prize winner in which there is an ode and a challenge to the English writer of the 17th century. In it, while creating, Coetzee opens a parallel door to modify, read and understand an emblematic work for literature. Coetzee's novels, in the words of Diego Sheinbaum himself, "raise a quadrilateral to confront writers of the past; not only imitating their styles, purifying them, and paying homage to them, but hitting them in their weak points, reaching corners that they left unexplored and pointing out implications in their works to which they remained blind". To conceive Coetzee's work from his relationship with the literature of other authors, with History and from his South African condition is fundamental to immerse oneself in a work as delicate as his: precisely that fabric is woven in this essay.