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In a published exchange of letters with Paul Auster, J.M. Coetzee set out a rule for his own fiction. He would not write novels in which characters carry personal electronic devices. The telephone was as far as he was willing to go, and even that reluctantly. His reasoning was not squeamishness about technology. It was that when people speak at a distance, an entire vocabulary of gesture, hesitation and involuntary signal disappears, and without it, he argued, “Dialogue … just isn’t possible.”