Customer Reviews

Slow Man

5 star:		(14)
4 star:		(18)
3 star:		(8)
2 star:		(9)
1 star:		(4)

 

 

Slow Man by J.M. Coetzee is his most recent work of fiction, and completes (for now) my goal to read all of Coetzee's fiction. This novel is different in some ways than his other fiction, though it deals, again with rhetoric, communication, meaning and process, but in, what I thought, was a very different and profound way.

Slow Man is the story of Paul Rayment, an Australian photographer about 60 years old, who is injured in an accident (he is riding his bicycle and is hit by a man driving a pick-up truck), and must have his leg amputated as a result. He refuses a prosthesis and returns to his apartment where he lives alone. Despondent over his lack of independence, he fixates on his Croatian nurse, Marijana, and her family.

This aspect of the novel is fairly straight-forward, but then comes Elizabeth Costello. (Yes, it is the same woman who figured in some of the essays of The Lives of Animals and the novel Elizabeth Costello.) She shows up univited to Rayment's apartment and moves in, introducing strange interludes, goading and cajoling Rayment, who resents her presence (he doesn't know her), but strangely allows himself to be subjected to her dominance and influence.

The plot cycles through issues that Paul has with Marijana, for whom he develops feelings, and her husband, son and daughter, his photography collection, and his efforts or nonefforts to adapt to his new physical situation. He considers his choices, his independence (or loneliness?), his career, his legacy, all in contrast to the fullness of Marijana's family life and their struggles as an immigrant family in Australia.

Elizabeth Costello's presence in the novel is very different from the reality put forth regarding Paul's life after the accident. The very human and realistic situation of Paul and Marijana's family is contrasted with the strangeness of the relationship he has with Costello.

It seems to me that Coetzee is presenting Costello as the author of a book about Rayment, and Costello is in the narrative nagging Rayment, introducing plot points, trying to see what he will do, pushing him to take an action, make a decision, bring his life and the story to some kind of apotheosis. I found this motif to be very revealing and insightful about an author's work and way of working. (We do know that Costello functions in some ways as an alter-ego for Coetzee. When he gave lectures in the United States, Coetzee read a story about Costello giving lectures instead.) Costello negotiates with Paul, she is irritated by him, she fights with him and is rejected by him, trying to find a way through to the end. I found it fascinating that she has this kind of volatile, unsatisfying and painful relationship with a character she is creating, and yet I know from what I have read about fiction writing, that characters come in many ways to authors, and many of those means are painful, unyielding and unsatisfying. In fact John Fowles writes in The French Lieutenant's Woman, "It is only when our characters and events begin to disobey us that they begin to live" (Fowles, 1969, p. 96).

I LOVED that Coetzee chose this way to illustrate the act of writing in Slow Man, because it is never "exposed" outright or done in a heavy-handed manner (I'm not even sure I'm interpreting the book correctly.) The layers of the novel provide the human relationships and the opportunity to scrutinize them that one would have in any novel through the arc of Paul Rayment's experiences as well as the opportunity to consider the act of writing, the origin of creative ideas, the psychic pain, really, of writing and creating simultaneously.This multi-layered "reality" provokes the reader to consider (as always with Coetzee) what is fundamentally true and what is true in the minds of those he features in his novels.

I put this novel on my list of more readable and provoking Coetzee novelsand I recommend it!

Coetzee has quietly established himself as one of a small handful of writers whose names get tossed about under the label of "greatest living authors." His work combines all the elements necessary to deserve that honor. He is an artist, a craftsman, and a thinker. His novels are carefully written and deeply meaningful. His prose is elegant, his characters are genuine, his stories are engaging. And his writing is full of purpose.

One of the things I like best about this book, and Coetzee's writing in general, is that he is not afraid to show the ugly side of human nature. He is confident enough in his writing that he can create a hero who is nowhere near perfect. In some cases, in fact, the hero is downright pathetic. Such is the case with Paul Rayment, our protagonist here. At his core we see him as a good person, yet profoundly flawed at the same time. He succumbs to serious lapses in judgment and falls deep into self-victimization, and yet we still admire him, or the very least we sympathize with him. For in many ways, he is just like all of us.

This book deals magnificently with the most basic of human needs - the need to love and be loved, and the need to leave a legacy. As our main character faces the onset of old age, and as a tragic accident leaves him without a leg and forces him to contemplate his own mortality, he begins to regret the wasted opportunities of his life. He realizes, too late, that there will be little to remember him by once he is gone. He carefully preserves his collection of rare photographs which he plans to donate to the state library when he dies, but even he himself recognizes the little value this collection has if his whole life's worth is to be judged by it. With no children, no family, and no close friends, he has failed to leave a legacy in the one and only way that matters - by touching the lives of others.

So when he meets Marijana, his Croatian-born nurse, he tries to make up for lost time. Partly motivated by selfishness, partly by desperation, and partly by an inchoate feeling of love, he attempts to woo her, all the while operating under a thin veil of altruism. Here we are asked to explore difficult themes: Can an act be deemed bad if it is based entirely on love? How do we reconcile the good and the evil that both live inside of us? What will we consider most important when we look back on the life we have lived? Coetzee does not make it easy on us, and for this most readers will be grateful.

One of the most fascinating aspects of this book is the mysterious appearance of Elizabeth Costello, the protagonist from Coetzee's earlier book. How she appears on Rayment's doorstep is not clear, nor for what purpose. Coetzee is clearly taking liberties here, forcing the reader to suspend disbelief, in order to create a neat construct in which he can portray the conscience and alter ego of his main character. Some readers simply won't accept this technique. Personally, it worked for me. I gradually stopped caring that he left too many questions unanswered, and came to appreciate the added dimension that this construct allowed the novel to achieve.

J. M. Coetzee's new book, "Slow Man" deserves much praise.... it is largely about maturity (or the lack thereof) concerning a main character, Paul Rayment, who has suffered the loss of a leg and Paul's guardian angel/agent provocateur, Elizabeth Costello, who takes over more than a little of his life. Yet it is nicely written and passionate in its own way.

Perhaps Costello's emergence in "Slow Man" is meant for balance and drawing Paul out is no mean feat. But her advice and platitudes become wearing after a while. Could Paul have survived in this book without Elizabeth? I would have preferred to have seen it that way....how he might have stumbled more with his nurse, Marijana and his attraction to her. Elizabeth is like an unwanted guest at a party and in the end I wanted no more of her. If that's Coetzee's final point, he takes a long time to get there.

However, on the plus side of "Slow Man"....and there are many pluses, the author keeps a good pace and reveals his characters with depth and understanding. "Slow Man" is worth the read but the reader may find it agonizingly depressing.

Coetzee's "Slow Man" is an ambitious novel that does not fully work. But the depth of the book, Coetzee's thought,and the sharply-honed writing style make the book rewarding. I found myself puzzled about giving this book four stars when I have rated many lesser works higher. Perhaps this is an inevitable difficulty with the rating system. There is much to be said for effort and scope in a book even when the effort falls short.

"Slow Man" is a multi-layered parable about growing old, assessing one's life following a catastrophe, the nature of love, and the difficult process of coming to self-understanding. The book takes place in Adelaide, Australia. The protagonist is a 60-year old solitary individual, a photographer named Paul Rayment who loses his leg in a bicycle accident. He refuses to accept an artificial limb. During his recovery he finds, for the first time in his life, that he cannot be self-sufficient and that he needs professional care. Thus he is cared for, briefly, by one nurse whom he abrubtly dismisses and then by a nurse named Marijana Jokic, an immigrant from Croatia who has a husband and three children, including an adolescent boy, Drago, who brings out fatherly feelings in Paul for the children he never had. Paul, alone, long divorced, and childless. reflects on what seems to him to be the empty, lonely character of his life. He finds himself falling in love with Marijana and wanting to help her children. His attentions to her person are rebuffed.

Into the story comes an aging novelist named Elizabeth Costello. Untlike some other reviewers on this site, I am unfamiliar with Coetzee's other novels in which Costello plays a leading role, including one with her name as the title. Thus, I was able to read this work on its own, without associations from Costello's role in Coetzee's other works. Costello seems to know a great deal about Paul, his difficulties and soul-searchings resulting from his accident, and his infatuation with Marijana. She is a sort of alter-ego, urging Paul somehow both to act and to reflect deeper, somehow both at the same time, to give up his futile quest for Marijana, and to take decisive steps with his life.

Costello makes an abrubt entrance into this book, and her appearance changes it dramatically. For some time, I questioned, as Coetzee seems to want the reader to do, her existence -- perhpas she is to be seen is a figure that Paul is imagining in his troubles. But no. This possiblity is explicitly rejected near the end of the book, as Elizabeth interacts with many other live, flesh-and-blood characters in the book. Paul and Elizabeth in effect complement each other, for all their difficulties, and each of them are needy with respect to the other. Elizabeth ultimately asks Paul to join her in a companionate relationship which Paul ultimately rejects. He learns the difference between love -- even the hopeless love he had for Marijana and a feeling which is "something less". The book comes to an ambiguous, difficult ending as Paul and Elizabeth go their own ways.

Elizabeth remains an awkward presence in the book, but she is necessary for Coetzee to tell his story. Her entrance is sudden and unexpected, but she functions as a way to call Paul to himself, even when the result is her own rejection. We really don't know at the end where the characters are going or the extent to which, if at all, they are the better for their search. But the book teaches about the power of love and passion, the fear of solitude and loneliness, the possiblity that one has missed one's way, and the ever-present hope of redemption. This is a troubling and difficult book.

Robin Friedman

Slow Man is the first Coetzee book I have read. I don't know how or why I picked this book first but I did. There were two fine points I did not know when I started to read the book that were key to understanding it, which I assume readers of Coetzee may have known. Fortunately, I learned about these points very shortly after the introduction of Elizabeth Costello into the story line. First, Elizabeth Costello is the title character for another Coetzee book and second she is also Coetzee's alter ego. Once I knew these two points the book made sense.

Slow Man seemed to me a book that Coetzee probably started with an idea in mind and had a problem actuating it. Paul Rayment, his lead protagonist, and his struggles as an aging man after a bike accident cripples him and forces him to examine himself and his life situation is an interesting topic to pursue. The introduction of Mrs. Costello though left me with the impression that Coetzee could not bring that story line to completion. Instead he introduces himself through Mrs. Costello and at times seems ranting to us that his character will not grow or go where he wants him to go. At times the author seems to be screaming for the character to hurry up and push on in his growth so he can be done with it. His frustrations and what I assume are the effects on him physically and mentally through the process of writing are relayed through Mrs. Costello. While this may be interesting to the reader at times, at other times it was not.

In the end, Paul Rayment has grown. He and Costello (Coetzee) are able to depart from each other amiably. I image a deep sigh was released by Coetzee upon completion of the writing process though.

Overall, the book was a quick read and interesting read, if you know the background. Otherwise it might have seemed odd as you tried to understand who Mrs. Costello was and how she came to have the knowledge she holds.

First, let me say that I am not a reader who is annoyed by ambiguity as long as there is some sort of explanation. As a literature major and a heavy reader of fiction, I am used to ambiguity. I just defended a novel in a review, The Zero, that was highly ambiguous. Please read my criticisms with that in mind.

Paul Rayment is a man in his sixties who loses much of a leg due to an accident. For no apparent reason he chooses not to have a prosthesis, even though he preferred the life of a loner prior to his accident, and even though a prosthesis would help him become self-sufficient again. By choosing not to have a prosthesis, he not only severely limits his ability to transport himself, but becomes quite dependent on others. Thus, in the first few pages we have a decision that makes no sense based on what we know about Paul. Okay, so be it. Let's see what happens. He eventually gets a nurse who he falls in love with. He is now in a dilemma because he is not exactly a "catch," and the woman he has fallen in love with is married and has three children. Yet how he yearns for her! At least things are getting a little interesting.

Enter Elizabeth Costello out of nowhere, who not only presses herself upon Paul, but moves in with him despite his protests. (He later throws her out and for no apparent reason she sleeps with the homeless). Why does he not simply show her the door from the moment he first finds her to be obnoxious? How did she find him? She says he sought her out, but he has no such recollection, nor is there any evidence in the novel to support her claim. Is she his alter ego or, as she claims, a novelist who has chosen him to be her subject? If she chose him, 1) how did she find him and 2) what made her decide to choose him as her protagonist when she knows so little about him? None of these questions is answered. So her continued reappearances become extremely annoying rather than riveting.

It is exactly as "Bookmarks Magazine" reads, "Simply, Coetzee's postmodern literary trick overwhelms what could have been a provoking rumination on love, old age, and life. Instead, the novel flounders under the weight of ambiguity, cerebral analysis, and lack of scintillating conversation and action." Put more simply, this is an awful novel.

The book starts simply. Paul Rayment, sixtyish, a French-born Australian retired photographer, loses his leg as the result of a bicycle accident. This obvious loss forces Paul to confront other losses, subtler but more pervasive: the loss of youth, of emotional stability, of metier, of homeland, of the opportunity for parenthood, of the capacity for risk-taking. If this sounds depressing, it's not. For one thing, there is Coetzee's straightforward and lucid prose; he must be one of the easiest to read of recent Nobelists. For another, Paul rediscovers love in all its many hues; the major theme of the book is his learning to distinguish between erotic love, gratitude, compassion, and caring. The scenes describing his relationship with his caregiver Marijana Jokic (and increasingly with her family) recapture the dangerous fascination with comparative strangers which is such a strong theme in Coetzee's DISGRACE.

This is also a novel about storytelling. Part-way through the book a elderly novelist arrives who seems to regard Paul as one of her characters, and who tries to propel him into a revised version of his own history. This is Elizabeth Costello, whom other reviewers describe persuasively as the author's alter ego, although I haven't myself read the novel of that name or the essays in which she first appeared. I also question whether the postmodern device was strictly necessary. Yet you soon begin to treat Elizabeth as just another character, and her presence ultimately enhances the inner warmth of this lovely book, as she becomes a very human catalyst for Paul's self-discovery.

This book has a very interesting position in Coetzee's career. It is his first work of fiction after winning the Nobel Prize, which means that it received a lot more attention immediately than any of his previous works. Likewise, this attention came from many corners that would not have even considered the book merely a decade ago. And while this increased crowd was expecting probably another "Disgrace," instead they got what is, indeed, a rather flummoxing read. This is without a doubt his most controversial book in regard to reception: reviews ran from glowing to almost pathologically dismissive. And reading the book now, without the reviews hovering over it, it's very clear why this is a case. I'm not going to play the elitist card and suggest that with an increased audience, more unsophisticated readers were unwittingly thrown out of their league, but that does almost seem to be Coetzee's intent with the novel. As many other reviewers have noted, the first 70 pages are classic Coetzee: the accident, the dehumanizing and humiliating stint in the hospital, the musings on age and death. Its all written in his sharp prose and unsympathetic style. However, then things change. The character of Elizabeth Costello (who functions as a stand-in for Coetzee himself, and is in some sort of continuation with his previous book, although the connections seem fairly unsubstantial) comes in, as the author who tries to prod the main character into some sort of being. And then the book moves into a strange stasis wherein things happen, but they really don't and then it just ends. And this, depending on who you ask, is either brilliant or maddeningly annoying. I don't really think it's either, honestly. Not that I can say with certainty what Coetzee is trying to accomplish in this section, but whatever it is, he does it rather clumsily and unconvincingly (I'm not even sure that he knows what he's trying to do here). There are flashes where the insight and innovation I associate with Coetzee come through, but overall the section can be quite a drag to read, and the ending itself is rather weak. Regardless, I don't regret reading this book, and I don't even really consider it a slump or a failure on Coetzee's part. If anything, it seems to be a sign that he is not content to sit on his laurels after the Nobel Prize, and is still, thirty-some years into his career, willing to experiment and take chances.

Coetzee's Slow Man starts off like it title, slow. For the first twenty or so pages, the reader many wonder where this rather prosaic story is going. Is Coetzee really going to tell the story of a man's struggle after the amputation of his leg?

But Coetzee always surprises, and Slow Man is no different. The novel beings, at about page thirty, to take different, deeper turns. Elizabeth Costello, Coetzee's fictional shadow self appears, and we get into meta-discussions on writers and characters. There is something deeply moving about the relationship between the amputee and Costello: two old people trying to make sense of their failing power, their weakening body, and their inability to leave a mark on a hard, impermeable world.

Be patient with this novel. Give it time to unfold. Coetzee is the master of applique. Sometimes it takes him time to build up the layers, but when he does, as in this novel, the results are spellbinding.

Paul Rayment, out riding his bicycle, is hit by a car and loses a leg. He is a retired photographer, an aging divorcee, with no children, and nothing much left to live for, at least as he sees it. His Croatian nurse gives him something to care about. It is not so strange that he, an old man with few prospects, would fall in love with this strong willed and efficient younger woman who didn't treat him as a cripple, who saw him as just a man, a patient, but a man with some kind of future. What complicates things is that he wants to do something to insinuate himself into her life, into that of her children. He can't know what'll come of it, and doesn't think that far, but it's the only thing he knows to do, and he can't help along the way but declare his love for the woman whose benefactor he proposes to become. A futile gesture, that only makes things awkward; what makes it worse is that his sense of decency also keeps him from following up on the possibilities. He's a complicated man, but all too predictable. It is the kind of scenario that starts out with promise: a damaged man, a useless passion bringing with it possibilities even at this late juncture. But where to go with it? How to make it more than an intriguing beginning to a story?

Enter Elizabeth Costello, a novelist (and central character of two other Coetzee novels: The Lives of Animals and Elizabeth Costello) for whom the predicament of Rayment is paralyzing. She can't tell him what to do, but she needs and urges him to do something. He came to her, she says, and he can't quite understand what that means, but we gradually do understand as readers. He came to her, and she has to learn from him what he might do, and can't ever be quite satisfied with what he ends up doing. In frustration, she proposes alternatives, that he give up his useless passion, that he pursue something attainable, but isn't that what it is to be human (at least as Sartre has it), to be driven above all by passion and not utility? That he refuses makes Rayment perhaps frustrating, but certainly more interesting. What ensues with the introduction of Costello and the introduction of the complications that follow from Rayment's obstinate pursuit of a useless passion makes for a fascinating and provocative read. Perhaps not as revelatory or groundbreaking as Coetzee's most famous novel Disgrace, and I think this would be best read not as a stand alone novel but as the concluding novel of a Costello trilogy (a kind of "Portrait of the Artist as an Old Woman"), but even on its own it would be well worth reading and certainly enjoyable.