Was J.M. Coetzee always funny? I laughed so hard while I was reading it The Pole and other storiesit demonstrates the artistic seriousness and philosophical depth that readers associate with his best work, and it made me wonder if I was missing the humor in novels like… shame AND The Life and Times of Michael K. This made the South African a two-time Man Booker Prize winner and a Nobel Prize winner.
The older characters in 83-year-old Coetzee’s new works speak with a disarming directness that makes them almost comical. Take Witold Vlacikiewicz, the seventy-year-old Polish pianist from The Pole and Five Stories published here, who goes to Barcelona to perform and falls in love with 49-year-old Beatrice. At his age, Witold has no time for subtlety, so he begins to send letters to Beatrice, informing him of his passion, from whose point of view the story unfolds from a close third person.
Beatrice, who is happily married, is stunned, but when she reluctantly agrees to see Witold again, he begs her to run away with him to Brazil. The feeling is not mutual, but Beatrice later invites Witold to her holiday home in Mallorca and confesses her conflicting feelings: “Why did she bring him here? What if she likes something about him? There is only one answer: he clearly likes her.
Witold dies and leaves Beatrice a series of love poems, which she translated from Polish into a language she can read. She is ashamed of some of the lines (“he found the perfect rose between the legs of one woman and thus achieved final peace”), but is there more to the poems than the translation reveals?
Perhaps in the same way that “Pole” addresses the question of what is lost when a text is translated. Coetzee wrote it in English but originally published it in a Spanish translation because, he said, he “wanted to counter the hegemony of the English language.” I don’t know Spanish, but the English version is worth re-reading and resonated in my head for weeks after I first read it.
We continue with the other stories in the collection, all but one of which feature Elizabeth Costello, Coetzee’s fictional Australian writer and the protagonist of one of his greatest novels. Now 73, she shows herself in darkly humorous form in “As a Woman Ages,” telling her worried son, “I’m too old to be serious.” a loss. Killing yourself at forty is a sobering commentary on our times. But when you turn 70, you commit suicide and people say, “Too bad, she must have had cancer.”
This continues to happen as Costello and her children discuss the best way to live an ethical life, the treatment of animals and the value of art. Although Costello questions her vocation, she provides a memorable line in which she says she regrets having “edited thousands of pages of prose” in her life.
In subsequent stories, Costello lives in a remote Catalan village and reflects on some of the themes that animated The Pole. Is this a sign that the novella was intended to be one of Costello’s works? This would add an extra plot layer to an already complex story that feels unnecessary.
However, the fact that this question came to mind is a sign that Coetzee’s experiments with storytelling are far from over. A late-career gem from one of the world’s most original authors, this book shows that he is still breaking new ground while revealing a funny side that may have always been there.
Source: I News
I am Mario Pickle and I work in the news website industry as an author. I have been with 24 News Reporters for over 3 years, where I specialize in entertainment-related topics such as books, films, and other media. My background is in film studies and journalism, giving me the knowledge to write engaging pieces that appeal to a wide variety of readers.