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Thursday, January 12, 2006

J.M. Coetzee Slow Man

Spoilers follow.

Slow Man is J.M. Coetzee’s tenth novel and his first since being awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2003. It is the story of Paul Rayment, an aging French-born photographer resident in Adelaide, Australia (the city Coetzee now calls home), whose life is thrown into disharmony when he is knocked off his bicycle by a car. Such an occurrence would usually be reserved as the climactic moment in a novel – that is, once an equilibrium of sorts has been established (as was the case in Disgrace). In Slow Man, the accident opens the novel; immediately the reader is plunged with Paul into a nightmare-like situation that for him is all too real.
The damage done to his right leg is so severe that he undergoes amputation in hospital. His condition necessitates some home help so he hires Marijana Jokic, a comely Croatian nurse, to whom he quickly becomes attracted. He also takes an interest in her family, almost envying her for the children he himself never had. He becomes particularly attached to her teenage son Drago, and offers to take him under his wing by means of paying his admission to a private school. Marijana’s husband becomes suspicious of this gesture and Paul’s relationship with his nurse, as well as the situation in the Jokic household, starts to sour. Then Paul receives a knock on the door. Enter Elizabeth Costello.
Costello, an Australian writer and intellectual and the title character of Coetzee’s previous novel insists Paul “came to her” (and not vice versa), and makes herself at home in his flat. But not before reciting some of the opening passages of the novel the reader holds in his or her hands. Are Paul and the Jokics characters of Costello’s new novel-in-progress? She eggs on the morose and house-ridden Paul to act decisively in his interactions with the Jokics and in coming to terms with his own self - the accident, it seems, has brought to the fore anxieties that have long bubbled beneath the surface.

Slow Man is a typical Coetzee novel in that, in spite of its size (though at over 250 pages, it is his longest work to date) it is a multifaceted work. As an individual forced by circumstance to re-evaluate his life and worldview, Paul Rayment bears resemblance to previous Coetzee protagonists like David Lurie and Elizabeth Curren of Disgrace and Age of Iron respectively. Coetzee’s preoccupations with notions of national identity and displacement are also felt in the characters of Paul and the Jokics: European émigrés living in Australia – a country ostensibly devoid of history and culture – unsure of their place in an adopted homeland. There is also the odd surreal touch – the appearance of Costello, Paul having sex with a blind woman in a dreamlike situation orchestrated by the lady novelist herself – which bring to mind scenes in Waiting for the Barbarians and Elizabeth Costello.

Slow Man has taken a bit of a pounding in the press. Many reviewers were so impressed by the tough-as-nails realism of the pre-Costello section of the novel that they argued her entrance snapped the narrative out of joint. These early chapters evoke powerfully the distress of an individual forced into a situation of despondency, and they resent that Coetzee did not continue in this quasi-realist vein. Yet the sudden appearance of Elizabeth Costello adds another complication to Paul’s life and allows for deeper soul-searching on the part of the protagonist. She also opens up new possibilities for Coetzee to investigate the creative process of writing fiction, and explore the division between fiction and reality and the relationship between the author and his or her work. This semi-new direction may disorient many of the author’s admirers, but to this fan, it’s more than welcome.

As always Coetzee’s prose is brilliant - direct, yet with an enviable elegance; the tone dispassionate, yet not without warmth (in other words, very unlike his former compatriot Nadine Gordimer – yuck). Although Slow Man does not quite reach the heights of what I believe to be his three masterpieces – Waiting for the Barbarians, the Booker winners Life and Times of Michael K and Disgrace – it is a worthy new novel by a remarkable writer. [4/5]

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