evilgeniusideas

There is something mysterious about love -- it stems from physical desire, intimacy and projections, and perhaps something else that will never be defined. In Coetzee's Slow Man, we are invited to the world of Paul Rayment, an elderly Frenchman living in Australia who ends up with an amputated leg due to an unfortunate incident. He is stubborn and laments over his fate, refusing to get over the fact that he is pretty much an incomplete individual. Enter his Croatian nurse Marijana Jokic, married with three children, who he subsequently falls in love with. Enter, also, Elizabeth Costello, a novelist who turns up at his doorstep because he "came to her". Elizabeth seems to be prophetic and she seems to know everything; she analyzes Paul's motivations and lays out his choices with reasonable explanations. Eventually, she offers Paul a choice : either to be with her, two old people, each lacking in their own ways, providing care to each other, or to confront Marijana and sort out the chain of events that ensue due to his own proclamations of his love. The story reaches its logical conclusion -- Paul has been somewhat blinded by his love all along, and what he imagines as possible or probable turns out to be wrong or improbable. But still, he does not follow Elizabeth Costello, and hence, we return to the question of love and its constitution and our need for it. My only gripe about the novel was the mysterious introduction of Elizabeth Costello as a character. Perhaps Coetzee was trying to do a metanarrative thing by introducing a writer, who serves as Paul's conscience, into the narrative, but Elizabeth Costello's abrupt entry and her mysterious origins efface the impact of the analyses that she gives. The best thing about it has to be the end, the playing out of events as expected, and the twist that comes after.

2023-03-02 02:07