Now, I am gladly going to knock another one off the 1001 Books list with J.M. Coeztee’s Slow Man. Oh, and that takes care of South Africa in my Around the World in 52 Books challenge as well. But what do I really have to say about the book? Well, that’s a bit more difficult considering my toes have been cold all day, I’ve got a “spot” on my forehead, and I’m so tired that I can barely keep my eyes open.
All of my remarks about this particular book will be prefaced by the fact that J.M. Coetzee is a well-deserved Nobel Prize winner. In fact, he is probably one of the greatest writers living today. I count his books, especially Youth and Disgrace, among my personal favourites. But lately, especially after the fiasco of a book that Elizabeth Costello turned out to be, I’m starting to wonder if he’s spending a bit too much time, well, talking to himself.
As the critical consensus is split between whether or not the character Elizabeth Costello is in fact Coetzee himself, I have to wonder about why he chose to include her, yet again, in another one of his novels. The story of Slow Man takes place in Australia where an older gentleman, Paul Rayment, ends up in a terrible biking accident where he loses a leg. The amputation puts a stop to his life as he has know it, obviously, and, as the novel progresses, he is less inclined to get better and more inclined to stop living altogether.
Nurses are assigned from the hospital’s roster of home care to care for Paul once he gets home, and he goes through a number of them before settling on Marjiana, who becomes a catalyst in his life for many reasons. And when things start to unravel as a result of both his injury and his professional relationship with this woman, Elizabeth Costello shows up on his doorstep unannounced, and stays. She’s an omnipotent character of sorts, spouting all kinds of meta-fictional/philosophical speeches about the state of his existence. And that’s where the book sort of goes off the rails for me—I don’t mean to sound flippant because I loved the first half of the novel, but the rest, meh.
One the whole, the book, at the beginning, comes close to passing the heartbreak test, and it excels at what Coetzee does best, which is delve into the most frighteningly human aspects of his characters when they’re set upon in the most horrific of ways. But the second half of the book became so pedantic and almost existential (not that that is a bad thing) that I sort of felt like I was listening to a Beckett play rather than reading a novel. And had I known I was going to be reading a Beckett-like novel, I would have been okay with it, but as it sort of showed up out of the blue to become that way, I was put off, and kind of disappointed.
Will that stop me from reading more Coetzee, not on your life. Primarily because he writes such awesome sentences, strings the words together like this:
“No, Paul, I could care less if you tell me made-up stories. Our lies reveal as much about us as our truths.”
She pauses, cocks an eyebrow at him. Is it his turn? He has nothing more to say. If truth and lies are the same, then speech and silence may as well be the same too.
But did it mix up my thoughts on Slow Man, absolutely. It’s almost as if Coetzee wrote two different novels and then patched them together, or he fell so in love with Elizabeth Costello from her own novel, that he wanted to keep on writing her. My only unanswered question now is why?
You have already read 6 books this year and I have only finished 1 (which, I might add, is one that was more than half way done last year).
I drop my jaw in amazement to you.
I got the book 1001 Books to read before you die as a late Christmas present from a friend. I was flipping through it, and for being so great, there are a lot of books in it that I have never even HEARD of before. But, I hope to, like you, attempt to read some of them. I found that I own a fair amount of them, just most of them seem to be on the to read pile instead of the read one!