Slow Man by J.M. Coetzee

2005 Novel From South African Nobel Laureate in Fiction

Feb 13, 2008

Slow Man, by South African native and Nobel laureate J.M. Coetzee, is a dreamy meditation on a life fundamentally changed by a devastating accident.

Slow Man, the 2005 novel by winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature John Maxwell Coetzee, opens with the protagonist, retired photographer Paul Rayment, having lost a leg after a car hits his bicyle. During his lengthy convalescence, Paul reflects on his life, a life he sometimes believes he has wasted. The novel takes place in Australia, the country to which Coetzee emigrated from South Africa in 2002.

The "fulcrum" character over which Paul's character arcs is his Croatian Nurse, Marijana Jokic. Though Paul is single and childless and Marijana is married with children, this is no star-crossed, soap opera plotline.

Paul's transgressions actually center around Marijana's teenaged son, a surrogate for the child he never had. But the outcome is as messy as one would expect, and the reader wonders if Paul's life will be redemptive after all.

Postmodern Literary Device: Elizabeth Costello

The writer Elizabeth Costello, title character of Coetzee's 2003 novel, appears abruptly after his debacle with Marijana's family, upbraiding Paul for his lack of initiative in directing his own life. Is she the voice on this Paul's road to Damascus, releasing the scales from his eyes?

While Costello's appearance has been criticized as "postmodern shenanigans" (Publishers Weekly), a "postmodern literary trick (Bookmarks Magazine)," or simply a "particular plot device, (American Library Association)," Coetzee really does get away with it, even though the reader may only half-believe that Costello is "real."

There are only a tiny handful of modern writers in the English language who can engage such devices successfully. Besides Coetzee, Australian Elliot Perlman (Seven Types of Ambiguity), Irish writer William Trevor (The Story of Lucy Gault) and British novelist Tessa Hadley (Accidents in the Home) are among the few with the chops to call on such techniques.

While the appearance of terms like "Nobel Prize in Literature" and "postmodern literary device" may intimidate some readers, be assured that Slow Man is a very accessible book to the reasonably intelligent reader.

If a reader picked up the book not knowing the provenance of the author (and presumably ignoring all the jacket copy), she would find herself absorbed into a tale that transcends time and place and ponders questions that have vexed the human race for millennia.

Sure, Coetzee challenges the reader a little, but he isn't deliberately opaque and daunting, and he seems to believe that the reader will trust him enough to go along with him on Paul's journey.

Coetzee grew up in South Africa, earning degrees there and in the U.S. at the University of Texas at Austin. He has taught at the State University of New York in Buffalo, the University of Cape Town in South Africa, Johns Hopkins University, Harvard, Stanford, the University of Chicago, and who now holds an honorary post in Australia at the University of Adelaide. He won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2003.

The copyright of the article Slow Man by J.M. Coetzee in Australian Literature is owned by Mary Hiers. Permission to republish Slow Man by J.M. Coetzee in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.