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Slow Man (2005)

by J. M. Coetzee

Other authors: See the other authors section.

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2,026507,951 (3.37)101
Paul Rayment is on the threshold of a comfortable old age when a calamitous cycling accident results in the amputation of a leg. Humiliated, his body truncated, his life circumscribed, he turns away from his friends. He hires a nurse named Marijana, with whom he has a European childhood in common: hers in Croatia, his in France. Tactfully and efficiently she ministers to his needs. But his feelings for her, and for her handsome teenage son, are complicated by the sudden arrival on his doorstep of the celebrated Australian novelist Elizabeth Costello, who threatens to take over the direction of his life and the affairs of his heart. Unflinching in its vision of suffering and generous in its portrayal of the spirit of care, Slow Man is a masterful work of fiction by one of the world's greatest writers.… (more)
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Showing 1-5 of 41 (next | show all)
This is a rather slow book to read. Not a bad book, but certainly not Coetzee’s best book, which, in my opinion, was Disgrace. This book was slow in many spots, but would once again pick up.

The characters were well developed. I felt like I really knew Paul Rayment, Marijana, and Elizabeth Costello. The dialogue was crisp and realistic as well. I enjoyed knowing these characters who felt real to life.

The story follows Paul Rayment, who loses his leg in a bicycle accident. His solitary life is suddenly changed in an instant. He refuses to be fitted for a prosthesis, and is cared for by a series of nurses. Paul becomes infatuated with Marijana, one of the nurses, and professes his love for her. He vows to put her son through school and help Marijana’s family in financial ways, much to the chagrin of Marijana’s husband. Enter Elizabeth Costello, a writer, who tries to bring Paul back to reality and sets him up with a romantic encounter with a woman named Marianna. They do not hit it off as Paul is still smitten with Marijana. There is a nice surprise ending that feels appropriate.

This is a deeply moving story about love and caring, loss and heartache, unrequited love and friendship, and finally about life and mortality. Despite the lag at times, I really enjoyed the book and look forward to reading more of Coetzee’s works. ( )
  dwcofer | Nov 27, 2023 |
I think Coetzee has gone down hill since he migrated to Australia. I loved “Waiting for the Barbarians” and “Disgrace”. But this, and the one before that introduced the character Elizabeth Costello were disappointing to say the least.

Who IS this Costello woman. She is neither likeable or unlikeable. She is a bore.

Don't get me wrong, I am an Australian and there are some wonderful Australian writers, but JMC will never be one.

The storyline is simple. Sixty year old migrant loses leg in bicycle accident and gets depressed. Falls for his Croatian nurse. Is rejected.

Into this scenario comes Elizabeth C who is supposedly a writer who has 'imagined' the hero (the amputee) and wants him to change in order to make her new novel interesting.

She fails. He doesn't become interesting. Neither does the book! ( )
  kjuliff | Feb 7, 2023 |
The first sentence grabs the reader and soothingly shreds the reader's expectations; no matter how painstaking, how beautiful...the plot is laborious. Paul's actions are frustrating and "his women" are unremarkable. It's a beautiful book that tries too hard. In Despair, Coetzee manages the unmanageable: he creates a sympathetic old, white, sexist male protagonist. I ate the pages; it was one of the most well-wrought novels I'd read. Perhaps my expectations were too high for Slow Man. ( )
  eliseGregory | Jan 1, 2023 |
The disturbance to this man's life from a loss of bodily integrity post-amputation. ( )
  brakketh | Sep 17, 2022 |
I didn't really understand where the character Elizabeth came from. Anyone have insight? ( )
  srlib12 | Oct 16, 2021 |
Showing 1-5 of 41 (next | show all)
J. M. Coetzee's signature work - "Waiting for the Barbarians," "The Master of Petersburg," "Disgrace," among others - has a tremendous austerity. Think of a Romanesque church in the late afternoon of a wintry November day, shadows in the corners, echoes in the choir, communicants here and there, a divine providence implied but absent. Doubt prevails. The question might be: What is it to be human? And what is it that conspires against us? What prevents us from grasping that which can be grasped, even if it's only a single hour free of distress? There is no consolation in this church, or in the graveyard that adjoins it. It's a common complaint that Coetzee's ministry can seem cold, abstract, willfully unforgiving. Formality has that aspect. But I think of his work as cold only in the sense of exact. Cold facts, cold numbers, cold dawn. Not heat, light. His books are as reliable as a plumb line.
Now comes "Slow Man," visible Coetzee from the very first sentence - but this time I think I hear a banjo in the choir.

The slow man is Paul Rayment, 60 years old, a retired photographer and archivist, divorced and childless, living alone. The venue is Adelaide, Australia. He's out for a ride on his bicycle when he's struck by a car he doesn't see. "The blow catches him from the right, sharp and surprising and painful, like a bolt of electricity, lifting him off the bicycle." He flies through the air, telling himself to relax, striking the pavement and commencing to skid. The skidding seems to go on forever, and when it's done he feels himself at peace, slack of body. He hears rather than feels his skull bounce on the pavement. He notices that the day is glorious: bright sun, benign temperature, a good time for a nap. When he awakens he finds his body no longer slack but thick, "ponderous." His first worry is his bicycle, since bicycles can be stolen; and then he faints. J. M. Coetzee's sentences are immaculate, and in a page and a half the scene, and some sense of what is to come, is set as firmly as a stake in the heart.

In an ambulance on the way to the hospital, Rayment is disoriented. What is happening to him? He hears voices and then, weirdly, the clack of a typewriter. This is his imagination at work, a message that seems to be written on the screen of his own inner eyelid. "E-R-T-Y, say the letters, then F-R-I-V-0-L, then a trembling, then E, then Q-W-E-R-T-Y, on and on." Gripped by panic, he is given a needle and awakens "in a cocoon of dead air." At the hospital, the news is not good. His knee is mangled and his leg must come off, though of course the surgeons will try to save as much of it as they can. If he were a younger man, they might attempt a reconstruction. But he is not a young man. He is 60, so what's the point?

The operation is successful, and Rayment must now endure the aftermath: the pain, the boredom, the washing, the catheter, the determined good cheer of the nurses, the surgeon's frank admiration of his own handiwork. This is not an admiration the patient can share; he did not give his consent. Before long a "difficult word" is added to his vocabulary: "prosthesis." With a prosthesis, he will be up and around in no time at all, perhaps even riding his bicycle again. He is told that wonderful progress has been made with prosthetic devices, really superb - and this news is unwelcome. Peevish, unsettled, appalled and in pain, Rayment wants no part of a prosthesis. Neither is he amused by his nurse's puzzlement - amazement, almost - at his family status. That is to say, he has no family. His parents are dead, his wife gone. He protests that he has friends, good close friends, but these do seem to be few in number. One comes to the hospital for a visit and later turns up at his apartment thinking about sex; and then she leaves and that is all we see of the friends.

Certainly Rayment will need rehabilitation, and that inspires yet another question. Would his insurance stretch to "frail care?" No, it would not. "Well then," the social worker says, "you'll have to budget for it, won't you?"

Rayment remains in the hospital for days, with plenty of time to reflect on the absence of his leg, and time also to search for the meaning of the imaginary typewriter and the truncated message. "Frivolous is not a bad word to sum him up, as he was before the event and may still be. If in the course of a lifetime he has done no significant harm, he has done no good either. He will leave no trace behind, not even an heir to carry on his name. Sliding through the world: that is how, in a bygone age, they used to designate lives like his: looking after his interests, quietly prospering, attracting no attention. If none is left who will pronounce judgment on such a life, if the Great Judge of All has given up judging and withdrawn to pare his nails, then he will pronounce it himself: A wasted chance." Rayment in a nutshell.

Home again at last, he engages a nurse skilled in "frail care." She is Marijana Jokic, a Croatian who learned her nursing skills in Germany. Rayment does not find her attractive, but she is very good with his leg stump, which he has taken to calling le jambon. Competence trumps beauty. Marijana is attentive when he wants her to be and absent when he wants to be alone. She does the shopping, the cooking, the washing, and when she smokes she is courteous enough to retreat to the balcony. But it is her care of le jambon and its "obscenely curtailed thigh muscles" that endears her to her patient, and soon enough Rayment has revised his estimate of her appearance: "more than not unattractive, she is on occasion a positively handsome woman, well built, sturdy, with nut-brown hair, dark eyes, a complexion olive rather than sallow; a woman who carries herself well, shoulders squared, breasts thrust forward. Prideful, he thinks."
So Paul Rayment, diminished in body, weak of spirit, disconsolate, worried by what he believes has been a wasted life, falls for his Croatian in a way that seems, in its opening moves, almost chaste. After all, she is a married woman. She has children. Rayment would not like to think of himself as a home-wrecker and so, after he is rebuffed, he conceives of unusual arrangements. The Jokic family could come live with him. He could live with them. He has money, anything is possible, including a kind of godfather status to Marijana's son, Drago.
But these events take place long after the advent of the ominous Elizabeth Costello, world-famous novelist and world-class pain in the neck - or if not world-class, at least seeded in the Southern Hemisphere. Still, she is not to be discounted: formidably intelligent, erudite and humorous. And so I am surely out of line when I think of her as a cross between Madame Blavatsky and Mrs. Portnoy. My sympathies lie with one-legged Paul.

Elizabeth Costello - she is the heroine of Coetzee's previous novel, "Elizabeth Costello," in which she seems to know everything about almost everything - has nominated herself to force Paul Rayment to take charge of his life, to act. She arrives at his apartment unbidden. They have never met. You came to me, she explains. "In certain respects I am not in command of what comes to me" - and this includes the very words Rayment used in describing his accident.

Elizabeth Costello is a great advice-giver: advice on conduct, children, language, apartment furnishings (Rayment's resembles "a Bavarian funeral parlor"), his relations with Marijana and the likely consequences if he declines to press the matter, and much else besides. Her justification for insinuating herself into Rayment's life: "I have been haunted by the idea of doing good." Rayment, for his part, thinks her a liar and fabulator and that she is in his life for one reason and one reason only. She wants him as a character for one of her wretched novels. But this seems not to be the case, and at last she lays her cards on the table:

"Do you think what I have said is the worst that can be said of you - that you are as slow as a tortoise and fastidious to a fault? There is much beyond that, believe me. What do we call it when someone knows the worst about us, the worst and most wounding, and does not come out with it but on the contrary suppresses it and continues to smile on us and make little jokes? We call it affection. Where else in the world, at this late stage, are you going to find affection, you ugly old man? Yes, I am familiar with that word too, ugly. We are both of us ugly, Paul, old and ugly. As much as ever would we like to hold in our arms the beauty of all the world. It never wanes in us, that yearning. But the beauty of the world does not want any of us. So we have to make do with less, a great deal less. In fact, we have to accept what is on offer or else go hungry. So when a kindly godmother offers to whisk us away from our dreary surroundings, from our hopeless, our pathetic, unrealizable dreams, we ought to think twice about spurning her."

Thus the ominous Elizabeth Costello's - I suppose the word would be "settlement." She gives Rayment 24 hours to decide whether to accept what's on offer.The answer is on the last page of the book.

I take this novel to be a scrutiny of disappointment and irresolution, a chicken-and-egg affair that does not yield satisfactory answers. Still, Coetzee's narrative is a bracing corrective to the blustering do-not-go-gentle-into-that-good-night. For Rayment, one chance after another has come and gone, some seized, most not. And when enough chances have come and gone, it can seem altogether wiser to maintain things as they are. Romantic leaps of faith are for the young. Rayment's heart is "in hiding." J. M. Coetzee has much to say about these matters and many others in "Slow Man" - beautifully composed, deeply thought, wonderfully written.
added by zasmine | editThe New York Times, Just Ward (Oct 2, 2005)
 
This is the first novel JM Coetzee has written since he was awarded the Nobel Prize in 2003. It displays all his expected pitch-perfect restraint, the language diamond clear, his attention always revealing a great deal more of his characters' intentions than they know themselves. He seems at pains here, though, to examine the nature of these gifts; to dismantle the mechanisms of his storytelling; to let the reader pull back the curtain a little and see him at work on the levers of his fiction and witness his practised pressing of all the right buttons.

Slow Man starts as a simple enough story. In an Australian suburb, a man is knocked off his bike. Paul Rayment enjoys the sensation of his body flying through the air. 'Relax!' he tells himself, as if he knows already that this is the last bit of lightness he will ever feel. He's right, too. When he wakes in a hospital bed, it is to give his consent to doctors to remove his leg above the knee.

The novel, thereafter, examines his reluctance, in the familiar phrase, to come to terms with the loss. To begin with, he can't cope with his nurses and, in particular, the one who calls 'the bedpan the potty; [and] his penis his willie'. When he hires a woman who can talk to him without embarrassment, who can bathe his stump and help him to his lavatory and rub some of the frustration of his new condition out of his back he, not surprisingly, falls in love.

The woman, Marijana, is a Croatian immigrant, married with children and an unfulfilled history that seems part of her attraction. Deluded, a little, Paul believes he can find ways to make her love him, despite his old, knobbly fingers and his singularity - he is a retired, divorced man who collects photographs of old Australian mining towns - and his new circumstances. He tells her of his love and she promptly disappears. It is at this point that into his life, and into the novel, comes Elizabeth Costello.

Readers of Coetzee will know Costello from his previous book. On that occasion, she acted as a kind of crabby alter ego, a novelist in her late sixties, invited to give a series of lectures on her - and perhaps his own - preoccupations, 'The Novel in Africa' and so on. At the heart of Elizabeth Costello, to further confuse matters, was a series of lectures Coetzee gave, partly in her persona, to the grandees of Princeton University in 1999, called 'The Lives of Animals'. In these, Costello argued controversially, fictionally that in the industrial production of meat for food 'we are surrounded by an enterprise of degradation, cruelty and killing which rivals anything that the Third Reich was capable of, indeed dwarfs it, in that ours is an enterprise without end ... ' Costello, you might say, therefore comes into Slow Man with a bit of baggage.

For Paul Rayment, this is literally the case. The novelist, now a couple of years older and more frail, of whom he has heard vaguely, arrives on his doorstep with her things, brusquely introduces herself and moves into his spare room and his story. She explains her presence by quoting to Paul the opening section of his novel, the bike and him flying through the air and so on. Far from intruding on his novel, she suggests, he has intruded on hers: '"You came to me [Paul], that is all I can say. You occurred to me, a man with a bad leg and no future and an unsuitable passion ... where we go from there I have no idea. Have you any proposal?" He is silent.'

From then on, as we are invited to believe she has all along, Costello dictates events, setting up rendez-vous, examining Paul's motivations for him. She has a novelist's sense of always moving things along, without ever quite knowing what will happen next. Her interventions into what, until then, has been a story of some compulsion might threaten, you imagine, to collapse any plausibilty and identification in Paul's predicaments. In fact, even as she reveals her manipulations, they prove what a consummate writer of fiction her creator, Coetzee, can be.
added by zasmine | editThe Observer, Tim Adams (Sep 18, 2005)
 
This novel begins with one of those life-changing moments that you know, even while they are still happening to you, can never be undone. "The blow catches him from the right, sharp and surprising and painful, like a bolt of electricity, lifting him up off the bicycle."

The blow - fast-moving car meets human knee at a busy intersection on Adelaide's Magill Road - results in the amputation of Paul Rayment's right leg; his knee is too badly smashed to save. The first 20 pages of this book are a pitiless, clinical account of what it feels like to be helpless in hospital as your body tries to recover from whatever you have done to it this time, while the world turns heedlessly outside. "If he holds his breath he can hear the ghostly creeping of his assaulted flesh as it tries to knit itself together again. Outside the sealed window a cricket chants to itself."

Paul Rayment, of course, will not "recover"; his leg, as the doctors and nurses keep unnecessarily telling him, will not grow back. At 60-ish he has no wife, no children, no lover worth the name; he does not wish his friends to be required to care for him.

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The first sign that his life after the accident might somehow be made endurable arrives in the form of his private nurse, Marijana Jokic, whose attentions, at once intuitive and practical, are at first bearable, then welcome, and finally longed-for.

Like Coetzee's earlier work, Slow Man again addresses the subject of suffering and its alleviation. Under what circumstances, asks this book, and under what kinds of contracts, is it appropriate or even possible for human beings to give each other help? And what distinguishes help from care, or care from love?

Sheena, the first paid nurse, is a horror, but Marijana, hired for the same wage to do the same work, is at once a saviour and an object of desire. Rayment's old lover, Margaret, offers to renew their relationship, a seemingly generous gesture but one made so gracelessly as to seem more repugnant than enticing. And Rayment's offer of financial help to Marijana's son is made in bad faith and causes major trouble in her family.

It is only at this point that the writer Elizabeth Costello, whom we know from Coetzee's last novel, arrives on Rayment's doorstep, upon which Slow Man turns into a different kind of book altogether. It is as though, having read the first few chapters of a seemingly uncomplicated historical novel in which a woman in a crinoline and a man in mutton-chop whiskers are arguing over tea by the fire, we then discover that these people are Heathcliff and his creator Emily Bronte.

Paul Rayment - who is in fact most un-Heathcliff-like: cautious, proper, withholding - is French by birth and a photographer by profession. He has an extensive collection of 19th-century Australian photographs that he thinks of as capturing some sense of post-settlement history to which he might feel that he belongs, for he feels he belongs nowhere else: no family, no workplace, no national culture nor cradle tongue.

He is appalled to discover that Marijana's son Drago has "borrowed" some of these antique images and has digitally manipulated them to give the pioneers and miners the faces of Jokic family members, tinkering with history and erasing documentary truths.

Almost every new character and fresh incident in this book raises some further moral, philosophical, ethical or aesthetic issue, adding another dimension to its rapidly proliferating complexities; Slow Man is a mix of fictional and metafictional modes, and a delicate, intricate layering of ideas and questions. What is love? Where is home? What really happened, and how do we know?

For so cerebral a writer, Coetzee keeps the physical world in sharp focus; this is a book about ideas, but its central premise is that a man has lost a leg. "Which is worse, the cloud of gloom in the head or the ache in the bone that keeps him awake all night?"

The writing is almost painterly in the precision of its physical details. Rayment's shopping, retrieved by the police after the accident - a tin of chickpeas with a dent in it, and a piece of brie that has melted and congealed in the hot Adelaide sun - has the quality of a still-life painting: homely groceries, in all their harmless domestic quiddity, left disorderly and disregarded in the aftermath of drama.

Once Elizabeth Costello turns up, it also becomes a book about writing and writerliness, though it has been full from the beginning of word play and literary allusion.

Costello's relationship to Rayment is part mentor, part tormentor, but she seems to agree with other fiction writers who describe themselves as being possessed by their characters: when Rayment asks her where one of the other characters has come from, Costello replies: "She came to me as you came to me . . . A woman of darkness, a woman in darkness. Take up the story of such a one: words in my sleeping ear, spoken by what in the old days we would have called an angel."

Novels like this are a reviewer's nightmare. You know before you start that no description or summary will be adequate, and superlatives seem both impertinent and unnecessary.

Coetzee is a Nobel prizewinner who has written another astonishingly rich book. That Slow Man is required reading should go without saying.
added by zasmine | editThe Age, Kerryn Goldsworthy (Sep 5, 2005)
 

» Add other authors (3 possible)

Author nameRoleType of authorWork?Status
J. M. Coetzeeprimary authorall editionscalculated
Baiocchi, MariaTranslatorsecondary authorsome editionsconfirmed
Böhnke, ReinhildÜbersetzersecondary authorsome editionsconfirmed
Bergsma, PeterTranslatorsecondary authorsome editionsconfirmed
Calvo, JavierTranslatorsecondary authorsome editionsconfirmed
Konikowska, MagdalenaTranslatorsecondary authorsome editionsconfirmed
Lauga du Plessis, CatherineTranslatorsecondary authorsome editionsconfirmed
Loponen, SeppoTranslatorsecondary authorsome editionsconfirmed
Preis, ThomasTranslatorsecondary authorsome editionsconfirmed
Siqueira, José RubensTranslatorsecondary authorsome editionsconfirmed
Udina, DolorsTranslatorsecondary authorsome editionsconfirmed
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The Blow Catches him from the right, sharp and surprising and painful, like a bolt of electricity, lifting him up off the bicycle. Relax! he tells himself as he flies through the air (flies through the air with the greatest of ease!), and indeed he can feel his limbs go obediently slack. Like a cat he tells himself: roll, then spring to your feet, ready for what comes next. The unusual word limber or limbre is on the horizon too.
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Paul Rayment is on the threshold of a comfortable old age when a calamitous cycling accident results in the amputation of a leg. Humiliated, his body truncated, his life circumscribed, he turns away from his friends. He hires a nurse named Marijana, with whom he has a European childhood in common: hers in Croatia, his in France. Tactfully and efficiently she ministers to his needs. But his feelings for her, and for her handsome teenage son, are complicated by the sudden arrival on his doorstep of the celebrated Australian novelist Elizabeth Costello, who threatens to take over the direction of his life and the affairs of his heart. Unflinching in its vision of suffering and generous in its portrayal of the spirit of care, Slow Man is a masterful work of fiction by one of the world's greatest writers.

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