Halfway through obligations and the remains of a curriculum shredded and scattered across the swirling concrete floor, I sigh and escape briefly into Coetzee’s Slow Man. How delightful! Lugubrious, dark, gloomy, scarred, misanthropic, full of regret and denial, exactly how we will all turn out. A man, powerless to act, ignorant, unwittingly pulling his life apart one thread a time. Paul, on the wrong side of sixty, loses a leg in an accident and declares his love for his day nurse, exalted and delectably imperfect, and in the aftermath emerges Elizabeth Costello: ‘As you said, you want merely to pour out your love upon her. You want to give. But being loved comes at a price, unless we are utterly without conscience. Marijana will not pay that price.’
Paul Rayment lingers not because of his acerbic, offensively melancholic life, but because he suffers for it, while we refuse to.
All in all, not a man of passion. He is not sure he has ever liked passion, or approved of it. Passion: foreign territory; a comical but unavoidable affliction like mumps, that one hopes to undergo while still young, in one of its milder, less ruinous varieties, so as not to catch it more seriously later on. Dogs in the grip of passion coupling, hapless grins on their faces, their tongues hanging out.
- Coetzee, Slow Man