ANZ LitLovers LitBlog

It is ages since I read anything new by J M Coetzee, winner of the Nobel Prize in 2003, and yet I have four books on the TBR: The Master of Petersburg (1994); Diary of a Bad Year (2007); Summertime (2009), and The Childhood of Jesus (2013).  I bought them all between 2009 and 2013 because I thought Disgrace (1999); Life and Times of Michael K (1983) and Slow Man (2005) were brilliant, but my interest faded with The Lives of Animals (1999); and Elizabeth Costello (2001). Only two of all these are reviewed here: Life and Times of Michael K (1983) published in my ‘Reviews from the Archive‘ series, and Foe (1986) which I re-read for Novellas in November in 2021 and realised how much I’d missed when I read it the first time.

Which is why I feel confident that I’ve missed some aspects of ‘The Pole’ which is the titular novella of this new book. After all in the very next story ‘As a Woman Grows Older’,  Elizabeth Costello muses on how she has made a living out of ambivalence, and she asks herself: Where would the art of fiction be if there were no double meanings? 

Narrated by a rather wry observer interpreting only the woman’s perspective, The Pole is a tale of unrequited love, first his for her, and then hers for him, half-hearted though it be.  The Pole and the woman he desires are poles apart at the beginning, and in a way that I should have predicted but didn’t, also at the end.

Helpfully, Coetzee’s Pole, the pianist Witold Walczykiewicz makes the allusion to Beatrice from Dante’s Divine Comedy explicit but his Spanish Beatriz will have none of it.  While he has, inexplicably, developed a huge crush on her, she is not the least little bit interested.  The wife of a banker with the sort of social responsibilities that banker’s wives have, Beatriz had been roped into escorting Witold around Barcelona when he came to the city on tour.  She had tried not to be predictable, and had found it easy not to gush or flirt, (which is what is expected of middle-aged rich ladies doing cultural duties with artistes.) She had not been ‘transported’ by his music…

So she had been quite startled by his attempt at renewed contact afterwards because his courtly behaviour had not given even a hint that he was keen. (‘Courtly’ because he’s channelling Dante falling in love with Beatrice, but equally, just distant in his manner, and not just because they are using his not-great English as a lingua franca because she doesn’t speak Polish and he doesn’t speak Spanish or French.)

Indeed, Witold withholds (ha!) his feelings and has an austere persona. Beatriz’s first impressions do not bode well for any passion.

He is a Pole, a man of seventy, a vigorous seventy, a concert pianist best known as an interpreter of Chopin, but a controversial interpreter: his Chopin is not at all Romantic but on the contrary somewhat austere, Chopin as inheritor of Bach.  To that extent he is an oddity on the concert scene, odd enough to draw a small but discerning audience in Barcelona, the city to which he has been invited, the city where he will meet the graceful, soft-spoken woman.

But barely has the Pole emerged into the light than he begins to change.  With his striking mane of silver hair, his idiosyncratic renderings of Chopin, the Pole promises to be a distinct enough personage.  But in matters of soul, of feeling, he is troublingly opaque.  At the piano he plays with soul, undeniably; but the soul that rules him is Chopin’s, not his own.  And if that soul strikes one as unusually dry and severe, it may point to a certain aridity in his own temperament. (p.3)

Is it Barcelona, the city itself, that evokes this change?  Coetzee doesn’t say so, but Barcelona is a very sensuous city.  The weather is benign; Gaudi seems everywhere even when one of his buildings isn’t in sight; and it’s colourful in every way, from the cuisine to the way the people dress and talk.

Or does the allure come from Beatriz herself?  Not with her intent, it doesn’t.

She doesn’t like the way he plays Chopin, he’s too old and unsexy, and he looks like a man with messy divorces behind him, and ex-wives grinding their teeth, wishing him ill. And anyway, although her marriage has degenerated into mere habit, she is not like her friend Margarita  and doesn’t have affairs. So no, she will not go to Brazil with him! (Where did he ever get that idea?)

However…

Although she is by nature not a curious woman, her curiosity is aroused, and, well, things progress.  More out of pity than even affection, must less love or lust.  Puzzled by her own behaviour, she sends him back to Poland, and gets on with her not-very-purposeful life.  And #Sorry, Spoiler, he dies.

70 isn’t old, not these days, (though a few pages later he turns out to be 72), but he was born in Poland, during the war. Maybe, muses Beatriz, that has left its mark…

She wonders what it was like to be born in 1943, in Poland, in the middle of a war, with nothing to eat but cabbage-and-potato-peel soup.  Is one’s physical development stunted?  And what of the spirit? Will Witold W prove to bear, in his bones, in his spirit, the marks of a starved childhood?

A baby wailing in the night, wailing with hunger. (p.9)

But Witold’s death is not where the story ends. Cunning old Witold has found a way to be present in her life and his afterlife!

I don’t think that’s all there is to it.  I don’t know why the sections are numbered, unless it’s an allusion to the way Chopin numbered his preludes.  Or Bach’s Inventions??

There is a reason why we are told he’s 70, and it’s then corrected to 72. It’s not just to remind us not to believe everything we read in a concert bio, surely?  Or that, in your seventies, a year or two hardly matters?

Is the whole thing a middle-aged woman’s fantasy? Or, what an ageing Nobel laureate imagines a middle-aged woman’s fantasy to be?

I did not like the rest of the stories in the collection.  Reading about old ladies gathering their far flung children to contribute to end-of-life decisions, is depressing, and the graphic depiction of the slaughter of animals, is manipulative.

Update 1/3/24: Wamuwi Mbao reviewed it at The Johannesburg Review of Books and liked the other stories more than I did.

Author: J M Coetzee
Title: The Pole & Other Stories
Publisher: Text Publishing, 2023
Cover design by W H Chong
ISBN: 9781922790354, hbk., 253 pages
Source: Kingston Library