SLOW MAN --by J M COETZEE : REVIEWED by NAVAL LANGA

The most important of all rights is the right to life, and I cannot foresee a day when domesticated animals will be granted that right in law. -- J. M. COETZEE

The winner of the Nobel Prize in literature in the year 2003, J. M. Coetzee is a man of his own kind, an engineer with his own tools. His novels were wedded with the real world until he wrote ‘Disgrace.’ With ‘Disgrace,’ he became the first writer to pocket the Booker Prize twice. 

Then came his novels Elizabeth Costello (2003) and Slow Man (2005), the neat fiction. ‘Slow Man’ tries to draw a line between fiction and reality. In ‘Slow Man’ the subject matter flows like a wide waterway. Here Coetzee tries defining the region wherein both fiction and reality live side-by-side, having common entrance and exit doors.

The story starts with a great fall and then turns into a river, taking us over to the distant regions. A man, Paul Rayment, age 60, alone after divorce, childless, and an Australian, is not a man of peaceful temper. Nor is he a man of satiated desires. 

After an accident that has made him fly in the air, he is bedridden with one leg amputated. But the accident, the flying from his bicycle seat, and the subsequent fall have not made him dreamless. He thinks about his life to come, though not with the same speed as before. He conjures up a new life. 

J. M. Coetzee signing at the
Penguin Random House Grupo Editorial
booth at the Buenos Aires Book Fair.

Keeping his middle-aged nurse, Marijana Jokic, in the center, he conjures up a family with her and her young son, Drago.  Paul craves living with Marijana and her good-shaped calves and even desires his extension through the Drago. 

Though in order to remain alive after his death, he has another contingent plan, too. He wants to donate a collection of his old and rare photographs to a library and remain alive through those photographs.

COETZEE’S MAGICAL RELATIONSHIP WITH THE READERS

THEME: SHAPE OUT THE LATER YEARS OF YOUR LIFE, MEN!

Such a spell of emptiness is agonizing, especially in the later phase of our life journey. The traveller finds the road ahead darkening. Literature provides us with some light in the darkness. 

The great thinkers, and their writings, have upgraded the literature to the level of religion in the secularized section of people. 

Keeping pace with this movement for providing primal education, Coetzee has carved out a striking statement in Slow Man. He has scripted a message, the message about the art of living. 

Circumstances do not allow him to do what he likes. Everything changes in a strange way when a stranger’s finger rings his doorbell. 

Here enters Elizabeth Costello, a fictional character from Coetzee’s previous novel of the same name. She wants to make out a character from the material on the bed, Paul’s reduced life. His life is ending in installments, the amputation of the leg being the first one. 

Unusual dialogues are bartered between Paul and Elizabeth. You occurred to me—a man with a bad leg and an unsuitable passion: that is what Elizabeth says to him. He neglects Costello in every possible way. But he keeps on pursuing Marijana, offering a scholarship to Drago for the study he is dreaming to undergo.

Marijana and her husband, Mr. Jokic, a Croatian refugee, turn down the offer. Whereas they reject Paul’s advancement for being Drago’s foster father, they avoid being thankless people. 

Drago, with active help from all of his family members, repairs Paul’s devastated bicycle. He turns the bicycle into a Paul Rayment, an amputee, friendly vehicle.

The satiric sentences, the unusual response by Paul to have no prosthesis, and Marijana’s caring presence are sufficient materials to make us turn two hundred and odd pages weightlessly. 

But J. M. Coetzee, seemingly a writer of the straight-lined stories, till the day surprises us when a character from his earlier novel forcefully enters Paul Rayment, the Slow Man’s life. Elizabeth Costello, a fictional entity, is not a simple woman. Nor has she come to behave sophisticatedly with Paul, a patient by orthopedic definition.

On knowing that the Costello woman would be making a story out of his sorry state, Paul wants to drive her out of his home. 

He unequivocally tells her his mind, too: "You treat me like a puppet... You treat everyone like a puppet. You make up stories and bully us into playing them out for you." 

He considers himself an ordinary man and is quite reluctant to become the center of a story. Here Coetzee’s narration is so pictorial that a reader would feel like they were sitting in the middle of the room where these characters run into each other.

Growing under the apartheid regime of South Africa and addicted to writing in allegorical ways, Coetzee always deals with the subject matter in non-traditional ways. 

The manner in which he transacts with our hearts is in no way a conventional one. He acts like a wild cat sitting on the chest of its prey. And many a time, the cat leaves us spilling blood. 

However, when the ‘Barbarians Are Coming’ or the shadows of ‘Disgrace’ are hovering over the characters, he endeavors to search for a possible way out.

In Slow Man, the writer-character Costello tries hard to connect herself with ‘the character’ Paul Rayment, but she fails on several occasions. 

The scuffle due to the gap between a writer’s demand from the character and the character’s denial to obey generates bitter conversations. The stage set for the ongoing wrestle entertains us on the first count. 

Secondly, the situation in which both the movers of the story are put into compels us to think on several unattended subjects. It induces us to think about the exact relationship between literature and mankind.

Writers who have insight into human minds and who hold immense sympathy for mankind would hardly resist the urge for choosing one or another set of ethics. 

Though in his unique pattern, Coetzee, too, does so in Slow Man. Paul Rayment is a retired photographer who should lead a comfortable old age, a life without astonishing events. 

But even after being reduced to a one-legged life, this man of aging flesh, Paul, thinks about his nurses’ soft skin and shapely calves. The art of growing older is, perhaps, missing from us, the humans.

We tally our bank balances; we pay our bills in time, more or less; but we fail to address the issues of vital importance to our life, especially life after retirement—a period that could be the most beautiful spell in one’s life. 

At this stage, one must have a clear-cut account of what has been achieved and what remains yet to be achieved. Here the question crops up of ‘what’ should really be done. Coetzee winks at that area.

The protagonist of Slow Man tries to find meaning in his life. He thinks about becoming the foster father of her nurse’s son, Drago. 

He loves to love Marijana’s children; he is even ready to accommodate her husband in his life. Marijana’s imposing presence, and her occasional non-attendance, exposes him to his inner emptiness. 

He yearns for filling the gaps in his life.

THE END

Image courtesy Mariusz Kubik, http://www.mariuszkubik.pl/, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Frodar, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

DISGRACE -- BY J. M. COETZEE: REVIEWED by NAVAL LANGA

                                  --REVIEWED By NAVAL LANGA

I tend to resist invitations to interpret my own fiction. -- J. M. Coetzee

A Novel Narrating Painful Social Changes

If you have a deep love for extra beautiful literature, and if you have enough room for reading a novel twice, at least, then J.M. Coetzee has a lot of things to offer. The winner of the Nobel Prize in literature in the year 2003, J M Coetzee, is a man of his own class, an engineer with his own set of tools. 

His novels are thick with real-world and human miseries. He based his writings on the events happening in his surroundings. He did so at least up to the date he had written his very famous novel ‘Disgrace’. He had tried a novel technique of blending facts and fiction in his next novel, Slow Man.  

When Disgrace was awarded the prize, J. M. Coetzee became the first novelist to pocket the Man Booker Prize twice. In ‘Disgrace’, he tries painting the landscape of a country, South Africa.

It is a tale of the time when the regime trading apartheid has just closed its shutters and people are yet to be adjusted to the change of climate. They are free in any respect; they have wings of the changed perception of their own. They have a multitude of newly formed rules to follow.

Keeping the contemporary South African stage setting before his eyes, J M Coetzee writes symbolically about the altered atmosphere. In order to create a visual metaphor for what Coetzee perceives, he uses the story of David Lurie. The protagonist is a professor in literature, and his daughter Lucy has transformed herself into a countrywoman. He superbly narrates how this countrywoman responds to the new challenges of her life in a distorted atmosphere.

Image by ChatGPT

The country is virtually lawless in rural sides where David and his daughter reside. They face a spell of legal emptiness which is agonizing; especially for a man like David. Coetzee narrates David as: ‘His temperament is not going to change; he is too old for that.’ In South Africa of David, there is a mass violation of the laws. Under such circumstances, one would find the future dark.

His daughter is made of different soil. After going through the life of a vagabond and leaving the company of a lesbian friend behind, Lucy tries to settle herself in the new environment. The changed scenario of the country has put a strange situation before her. She tailors a novel solution for surviving in the new world. She rears dogs for sale; she produces vegetables and flowers on her Eastern Cape farm.

THE PLOT: A STORY OF NATIONAL DISGRACE

Disgrace - A Novel With a Strange Plot by J. M. Coetzee

The Nobel Prize winner J. M. Coetzee became the first writer to get the Man Booker Prize twice when he got it for his novel ‘Disgrace’. The novel has a simple and linear plot. It essentially starts when David Lurie, the protagonist of the novel, engages in a corporeal act with one of his students.

Caught in a fix, the student registers a complaint about sexual harassment against him. Despite strong suggestions by his colleagues to deny and defend the allegations of having sex with the girl, Professor David Lurie accepts the allegations. 

Thus, in becoming honest in his acts, he invites the obvious ouster from the job. The life of disgrace starts from this point.

Image by ChatGPT

He goes to live with his daughter, Lucy. After being disgraced, and while living at the farm owned by Lucy, he wakes up into another world. 

He encounters a world where people have to sacrifice most of their legitimate rights. He met the people who have to compromise on seemingly odd issues.

South Africa of David and Lucy is newly liberated from the clutches of apartheid. The old trees are razed out, but the plants of the new order are yet to be rooted in. During this turmoil, he meets Bev, a friend of Lucy who runs a veterinary hospital. 

Before he knows more about why the lives of terminally ill dogs are ended by a fatal but pain-relieving injection given by Bev, some miscreants attack the farm of Lucy. She is gang-raped and her dogs are shot dead. The house is looted, and David’s car is stolen.

He lodges complain about his car, but Lucy denies registering a complaint against those who have raped her. It is the cost of living on the land: that is what she believes. When her father tells her to “Sell up”, she refuses. Here, David learns a chapter in parenthood. There comes a date when children start living without the help of their biological cord, parental assistance.

Lucy is more stable in her life, remaining attached to her own piece of land. In a way, she responds more logically to the challenges of life, in comparison to her desperate father, who has frequented prostitutes searching for the meaning of life. He strangely accepts reality. She decides to bear the child of the neo-oppressor, the therapists. It reveals how a woman can adjust to a changing environment. Those who are unaware of South Africa's present may not be able to swallow the tough pill.

Disgrace - A Novel Narrating Characters Facing Strange Situations in Life

Nobel prize-winning writer J. M. Coetzee presently lives in Australia. But he is born in South Africa. He lived there most of the years of his life. This has helped him know the social setup in South Africa very closely. His novel ‘Disgrace’ is the story of a professor of literature. But it is an allegory of the present social situation in the country.

In ‘Disgrace’, the novelist puts forward a question about when the disgrace starts. The protagonist enters into an unethical act with one of his students; it is not rape per se. She is not a minor; she is not abducted; she is not subjected to any force. But the girl remains muted during the process, where David, the protagonist, enjoys himself. Here, the same thing is not perceived in the same sense. 

A man and a woman are required to see the ‘same thing’ in the ‘same sense’, especially in sexual matters. If the weaker partner, here the woman, feels cheated, the period of grace is over and the ‘disgrace’ starts.

Apart from this, Coetzee narrates another type of ‘disgrace’, too. Living under the apartheid-infected air of South Africa, he is addicted to writing in allegorical style. He has always looked at modern subject matters through non-traditional glasses. The manner in which he transacts with our hearts is in no way a comfortable one. Nor it is conventional, too. 

He acts like a wild cat sitting on the chest of its prey. And every time, the cat leaves us spilling blood. However when the ‘Barbarians Are coming’ or the shadows of ‘Age of Iron’ are hovering over the characters of his novels, he honesty searches for a possible way-out for them. In ‘Disgrace’ he paints a picture of a different life; the life that the ‘whites’ of South Africa have to pull on.

After the fall of the apartheid rules, the thinking of local people has changed. The natives start disliking the ‘holding of the land’ by ‘white’ people. Lucy has a servant, Petrus. He is a native. He now puts forward a strange proposal. He believes that her holdings would remain safe if Lucy became his second wife. 

A locally influential leader and his men visit her house with a clear-cut design. They gang-rape her. The lesson rapists want to convey is simple: hand over our land; bear our children, and remain alive. They hate Lucy’s unencumbered ownership of a ploughable piece of land.

This is the disgrace, Coetzee wants to narrate.

J M COETZEE'S STYLE AND NARRATIVE TECHNIQUE

Literature provides us with some light in the darkness. The great thinkers and their writings have upgraded literature to the level of religion in the secularized section of people. Keeping pace with this movement for providing primal education, J. M. Coetzee, a Nobel Prize-winning writer, has carved out a striking example in his novel ‘Disgrace’. 

This novel has won the Man Booker Prize. By winning this Prize, Coetzee has become the only writer winning this prize twice.

While reading Coetzee, humour would hardly fail in easing our strains. It would make our minds lighter by the passages loaded with visible and hidden meanings. Had Coetzee not been a humorist as he is, he would have been branded as a rebel for selecting the subjects of his writings. He might have found his place just beside Nelson Mandela. 

But he happens to be a writer. The writer is a warrior fighting with the arsenal of his words, the words flowing through his mighty pen. It is the strongest part of the story woven in his novel ‘Disgrace’ that he does not allow the protagonist to run away. 

Under the given circumstances, he had the option to get away with the inquiry set up against him. Instead, he accepts responsibility for what he has done.

The visual metaphors used in narrating the scenes carry us to the place and in time where the characters of the novel are struggling to live. Nowhere does the narration seem very dramatic. 

Lucy’s rape, an act of the highest insult a man can do to a woman is narrated in a few lines. These lines are emphatically convincing. The challenges the characters in ‘Disgrace’ face is just like other common people. But their responses to these challenges are quite different. 

That is how the literature in general and a writer, in particular, provide us with light in the darkness. Coetzee narrates this darkness in a very impressive manner. J M Coetzee is a master of the art of telling stories. He makes the readers feeling immediately identify with the characters. 

In ‘Disgrace’, the writer puts us in the midst of an environment in which events are happening. The vivid description of college activities and the way in which students behave with their studies make us believe the scenes. They all look like parts of our day-to-day life.

Novels written by Coetzee are filled with irony and satire. His writings entertain the readers according to their intellectual heights. In the case of ‘Disgrace’, the thematic compulsions and perpetual happenings of sad events restrained him from becoming an outright humorist. But he has counterbalanced it by putting lightweight words in the blank spaces lying between two sentences.

[Images courtesy 

Mariusz Kubik, http://www.mariuszkubik.pl, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons     

Mariusz Kubik, http://www.mariuszkubik.pl/, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons]