Truncated bodies and ministering nurses
A throbbing tale makes Mahbub Husain Khan happy
Slow Man is the latest novel by Nobel Laureate (in 2003) and Booker Prize winner (1999) JM Coetzee. After his novel Disgrace, which won the Booker Prize in 1999, he has written three novels: Youth, Elizabeth Costello, and now Slow Man. South African literature has now come to mean more than Cry, the Beloved Country, and the white South African writers Nadine Gordimer and Athol Fuggard. But not everybody realises this truth. I was rather surprised when a senior journalist in Dhaka, who is now with an English language daily newspaper, was asking about the background of JM Coetzee after he had won the Nobel Prize as this journalist had not, till then, read any of his novels. Coetzee is an exception rather than a typical representative of Black South African fiction writing. His fiction does not exploit the readymade plots of racial violence, social apartheid and interracial love affairs doomed from the beginning. In Slow Man, the setting is in Australia, a country which has to do with "... colonialism, late colonialism and neo-colonialism", like South Africa. The novel's chief protagonist is Paul Rayment, a professional photographer, of French parentage and born in France, who has migrated to Adelaide in Australia after his marriage to the Frenchwoman Henriette. But the marriage does not work out and the couple have no children, and Henriette has left Paul before the story starts. Paul Rayment is now "... unmarried, single, solitary, alone". He is on the threshold of a comfortable old age when a calamitous cycling accident, where his cycle is hit by a car driven by a youth results in the amputation of a leg. Humiliated, his body truncated, his life circumscribed, he turns away from his men and women friends, well-wishers, companions and lovers. For his daily care he hires a nurse named Marijana, who like him has had a European childhood in Croatia. Tactfully and efficiently she ministers to his needs but avoids sexual encounters. His feelings for her, and for her handsome teenage son, are complicated by the sudden arrival of the celebrated Australian novelist Elizabeth Costello, the protagonist of Coetzee's previous novel. She threatens to take over the direction of his life and the affairs of his heart and to use him as her 'laboratory mouse' for her next 'experimental' novel. Coetzee tells us only what we need to know. But what is left untold creates an extraordinary density of emotional atmosphere. His characters are few in this novel, but are capable of surprising us. Every incident described seems to throb with potentiality, with an edgy, exciting, sometimes titillating, sense of what else might be happening or is going to happen. With a wonderfully controlled series of modulations Coetzee allows his characters and the plot to move towards some kind of resolution. This is a story of the sufferings of men and women told unflinchingly in prose of spare, steely beauty and with an intelligent potency that makes it as exhilarating as it is grim. Once again, this novel is a masterful work that confirms Coetzee's claim to be considered as one of the best novelists alive. Mahbub Husain Khan is a former civil servant and critiques books .
For all latest news, follow The Daily Star's Google News channel.
Comments