The Pole and Other Stories review: JM Coetzee’s meditations on love and longing

Set in contemporary Spain, the novella, The Pole, follows Beatriz, a middle-aged, married woman who is suddenly asked by her friend to look after a Polish pianist. The Pole, Beatriz discovers, is ‘a man old enough to be her father’. His name is Witold Walczykiewicz. Being a stylish patron of arts, Beatriz is no connoisseur of music. She is aware that she is ‘not taken seriously’ and is ‘mocked’ by others but when she sets her eyes on the white-haired pianist, she is struck by his tall height. From there, the readers are taken into the consequences of this chance encounter of two radically different people finding solace in each other.

A connect forged through language

Coetzee’s expertise lies in the use of his very simple and elegant language. Here, there’s no big words, or complicated phrases making the reader stop and search for their meaning. In Coetzee’s prose, sentences flow exactly like the Pole’s recital of German-Austrian composer Joseph Haydn’s sonata — ‘clean, crisp lines…dance together as delicately…’ Take this line in chapter 3: “If you now say I am liquid, then I will begin to believe in you.”

It’s an interesting moment in the book when two people who do not speak the same languages try to find a common ground by resorting to English. Neither Beatriz nor the Pole are native English speakers and yet these brief exchanges over the course of their lives gives language a unique place. Language is at one time both pointless and significant. It dissolves its mechanical structure, the langue and parole withers into the thick air of desire between two ageing individuals who have discovered new love too late in life. It unsettles their idea of belonging and commitments.

But language also restores them to their acceptance of each other as humans longing to be held and spoken to. In music, in conversations about musicians, in discussions on families and life in different societies, language blossoms and fixes their love more strongly. It is the tie established through language that outlives the love between Beatriz and the Pole. Two cumbersome tongues flow like liquid disrupting each other. Much like the stories in Kazuo Ishiguro’s Nocturnes.

The dilemma of holding on and letting go

Beatriz’s character is indiscernible. She is vehemently against the idea of love. She finds things to complain about the Pole. However, in the very next moment, she spends days thinking aloud of his letters, mails, and silences. She and her husband are aware of their alienation from one another but she is not ready to think of someone else yet. It’s interesting and surprising how she asks her husband if he was jealous of the Pole who now desired her. And then she laughs together with her husband at the idea of going to Brazil with the Pole.

Such a character is quite reminiscent of the complex spinsters British writer Anita Brookner sketches in most of her novels. Anna Durrant in Fraud (1992) is a typical Brookner protagonist. A middle-aged, lonely woman who runs away from her home. Beatriz is on a similar plane to run away, start life anew and challenge everything that she sees as a block. While Brookner’s women go ahead with it, Coetzee’s Beatriz does not. She holds on to herself. There is something deeply discomforting and real about this holding on. The reader is made desperate to see Beatriz take that final plunge, to go over to the other side.

The Pole, on the contrary, takes the challenges presented to him. He is ready to bare himself to a woman 24 years younger to him. He is her Dante Alighieri producing music and fighting for his Beatrice. He is ready to cross the divide and travel to the circles of Hell in pursuit of love. Beatriz finds all of this rather Machiavellian. But the Pole is resolute until life has other plans for him. Readers of Coetzee cannot help but think of Elizabeth Costello from the 2003 book with the same title. Age deflating her confidence. Emotional loneliness dulling her patience for other people. Coetzee’s alter ego finds reflection in the Pole’s resigned attitude to professional life, his need to be wanted both emotionally and physically by a woman, and his sad acceptance of life’s nearing end. It is almost heartbreaking when things take a drastic turn by chapter 4 and the reader, like the characters, are left stunned with disbelief.

The arcs of stories

Following the 150-page novella, we encounter five short stories. These stories bring back Coetzee’s Elizabeth Costello travelling to meet her son and daughter from Australia, perhaps for the last time. Costello has ‘dark thoughts… about history. It has become an obsession.’ She argues with her daughter about living by herself, beauty, power, desires, ‘brain science’, and novels.

In the next story, we return to Costello’s agitation against animal cruelty. Her son finds her living with cats and a criminal who takes care of the house. He is worried after seeing her feeding wild feral cats and promising her estate upon the caretaker. She has moved from Australia and is now in a village in Spain. Costello is remarkable and her presence as the author’s voice makes the story intensely thought-provoking. She says, ‘I don’t want to be an example… Let other people be examples. I follow where my soul leads me.’

Coetzee’s philosophical reflections on the German-philosopher Martin Heidegger, and his phenomenological ideas on animals and being soars in the story ‘The Glass Abattoir’. His mother, the great novelist, is definitely going senile, the son believes as he hears her bizarre idea of constructing an abattoir to demonstrate how animals are cruelly treated. There is a hint of Coetzee’s 1999 novel Disgrace one finds in the story where animals are euthanised as sexual misadventures occur. Here the coitus of teacher-student — Heidegger and Arendt — are brought to focus as animals die. Coetzee reflects and wonders if contradictions in desires and politics begin from the disgrace of simply being human.

The quintessential Coetzee

The last two stories from the book are the saddest and hopeful, respectively. ‘Hope’ is Costello’s final entry into senility as she needs to ‘do the business’ with herself, with dementia clouding her mind. She calls her son for rescue, to help her sort her life’s work before she goes ahead. Artfully, Coetzee explores the idea of hope, life and death in this moving tale of a character who has always been so full of herself, and life. One cannot help but extend themselves to Costello as though this was her final goodbye to us after being in Coetzee’s pages for these many years.

In ‘Dog’, to remind us that Costello still has life in her, we see her in her anger, and her wrath. The story brings the book to a fitting and hopeful conclusion. Life isn’t over yet. Not for the woman Elizabeth Costello at least. Not for the Costello we find in The Pole. And neither for the 83-year-old Costello writing about an ageing pianist and an ageing writer. This new book is emblematic of Coetzee’s excellence and erudition. He is a writer whose books will always be recognised more than the two Booker-Prizes and the Nobel Prize accompanying his name.