She installs herself in Rayment's flat and harangues him about his indecisiveness. "It doesn't have to be this way, Paul. I say it again: this is your story, not mine. The moment you decide to take charge, I will fade away."
Towards the end she chivvies him into a bold act, but the result is a debacle. "All that fury!" she observes disingenuously. "All that self-righteousness!"
The book concludes with an astonishing proposal. When Rayment turns it down, she says forlornly, "But what am I going to do without you?"
Elizabeth Costello
I didn't much care for her or the metafictional aspect of the book. At times Slow Man seems very self-indulgent, in part because I could not shake the impression that Rayment is modelled on Coetzee himself. It's a layered book -- serious, yet playful -- and sometimes hard to tell which is which.
"Losing a leg is not a tragedy," says Elizabeth at one point. "On the contrary, losing a leg is comic."
It's as though Coetzee is amusing himself with a highly polished piece of recursive fiction.
Two Bookers and a Nobel
Coetzee didn't win these awards for nothing. The best part of the book is the Jokic family, superbly drawn and full of surprising turns. The surname is suggestive -- a family of jokers. Like them, nothing in this book is what it seems.
The prose is precise as a scalpel.
Despite having no arms the Venus of Milo is held up as an ideal of feminine beauty. Once she had arms, the story goes, then her arms were broken off; their loss only makes her beauty more poignant. Yet if it were discovered tomorrow that the Venus was in fact modelled on an amputee, she would be removed at once to a basement store. Why? |
This is my first Coetzee, and his first since winning the Nobel in 2003. Like all his work, it's inspired strong reactions. Here's one from (a distant relative?) Yvonne Zipp.
