As he gets older he finds himself growing more and more crabby about language, about slack usage, falling standards. Falling in love, for instance. 'We fell in love with the house', friends of his say. How can you fall in love with a house when the house cannot love you back, he wants to reply? Once you start falling in love with objects, what will be left of real love, love as it used to be? But no one seems to care. People fall in love with tapestries, with old cars. A man contemplates his deep connection to a house. The unfathomable idea of threshing wheat points to a life lost. And a writer ponders the creation of his narrator. Three Stories-'His Man and He', written as Coetzee's acceptance speech for the Nobel Prize for Literature, 'A House in Spain' and 'Nietverloren'-is the work of a master at his peak. These are stories that embody the essence of our existence.