The Pole: A Novel

by J. M. Coetzee

Overview

A psychologically probing, compulsively readable novel about dogged love and the unpredictability of human relationships—from the Nobel Prize–winning author of Disgrace.

Exacting yet maddeningly unpredictable, J. M. Coetzee’s The Pole tells the story of Wittold Walccyzkiecz, a vigorous, “extravagantly white-haired” Polish pianist who becomes infatuated with Beatriz, a stylish patron of the arts, after she helps organize his Barcelona concert. Although Beatriz, a married woman, is initially unimpressed by Wittold, she soon finds herself pursued and ineluctably swept into the world of the journeyman performer. As he sends her letters, extends countless invitations to travel, and even visits her husband’s summer home in Mallorca, their unlikely relationship blossoms, though, it seems, only on her terms. The power struggle between them intensifies—Is it Beatriz who limits their passion by controlling her emotions? Or is it Wittold, trying to force into life his dream of love? Evocative of Joyce’s “The Dead,” The Pole is a haunting work, evoking the “inexhaustible palette of sensations, from blind love to compassion” (El País) typical of Coetzee’s finest novels.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781324093879
Publisher:	Liveright Publishing Corporation
Publication date:	09/19/2023
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	176
Sales rank:	88,787
File size:	3 MB

About the Author

J. M. Coetzee is the author of more than twenty books, including The Life and Times of Michael K, for which Coetzee was awarded his first Booker Prize in 1983, and Boyhood: Scenes from Provincial Life, a memoir. With Disgrace, Coetzee became the first author to win the Booker Prize twice. In 2003, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature.
Born in Cape Town, South Africa, J. M. Coetzee is the author of twenty books, including Waiting for the Barbarians, which won South Africa’s highest literary honor, the Central News Agency Award; The Life and Times of Michael K, for which Coetzee was awarded his first Booker Prize in 1983; Boyhood: Scenes from a Provincial Life, a memoir; and several essay collections. With Disgrace, Coetzee became the first author to win the Booker Prize twice. In 2003, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature.

Hometown:

Adelaide, Australia

Date of Birth:

February 9, 1940

Place of Birth:

Cape Town, South Africa

Education:

B.A., University of Cape Town, 1960; M.A., 1963; Ph.D. in Literature, University of Texas, Austin, 1969

Editorial Reviews

07/24/2023

Nobel laureate Coetzee returns (after the Jesus trilogy) to the brevity of his earlier works in this rich and engrossing story of a brief love affair between a Polish pianist and a wealthy Spanish woman. Witold is in his 70s, “a relic of history,” and has made a name for himself as a “controversial” interpreter of the works of his countryman Chopin. Beatriz is a banker’s wife and a casual patron of the arts. The pair meet when Witold is invited to play for Beatriz’s “Concert Circle” in Barcelona. What follows is a strange, lopsided entanglement: Witold is the pursuer, apparently consumed by an epic passion that makes sense only to him. Beatriz is initially bemused, later offended, and then suddenly amenable, a change of heart that leads to the lovers’ only tryst: a few days spent together in Beatriz’s husband’s family vacation home in Mallorca. After Beatriz puts an end to the affair, she looks into her heart and finds “no dark residue: no regrets, no sorrow, no longing.” Much is made of Witold’s age and “deficiencies”; he’s much more of a cipher than Beatriz, whose interior monologue readers are privy to. The prose is unornamented but nevertheless consistently incisive. Coetzee’s ability to render the human condition in all its vagaries is as masterful as ever. (Sept.)

Publishers Weekly

"[A] masterclass in the ‘late style’ at its best . . . among the pleasures of ‘The Pole’ are the layers it reveals. It is a book not only of the living but also of the dead. What does love mean? Coetzee wants us to consider. And memory — what consolations can it offer when we know it doesn’t last? . . . In this deeply moving novel, Coetzee reminds us of what we wish we didn’t have to remember: that everything dissolves."

Los Angeles Times - David L. Ulin

"Coetzee’s prose is certainly economical. It avoids embellishment of any kind—adjectives, appositions, repetitions. And, in that it avoids ambiguity, it is not poetic. Its main purpose is to render the muddle and fog of experience with clarity and fluency, and in his later works Coetzee achieves this with the sprezzatura of an Old Master. There’s not a sentence in The Pole that isn’t crystal clear. And it flows with such grace that you could read it from beginning to end while standing propped up against the mantelpiece."

Mothers and Others - London Review of Books - Nicholas Spice

"Coetzee may turn out to be one of the last great novelists, exalted by the intensity of his self-awareness and his willingness to make his home in a spiritual and intellectual impasse of which few of his contemporaries were even aware."

Nation - Pankaj Mishra

"Exquisitely elevating the fundamental influences of music and language, The Pole unequivocally affirms the often enigmatic relationships among art, love, and human experience."

George Kendall

"[A] surprisingly tender new book. "

Who Are These People? - New York Review of Books - Michael Gorra

"The Pole serves as an excellent microcosm of the human condition—scrutinizing, sharp, and delicate. . . . Contemplative and careful, this seemingly unassuming story will stick with the reader long after the last page is finished, as a stunning ending forces a reconsideration of all that preceded it.
"

‘The Pole’ Review: Two Troubled Hearts in a Constant Tug-of-War - Harvard Crimson - Erlisa Demneri

"In The Pole, [Coetzee] moves beyond rendering the opacity of the beloved to suggest how love transforms the object of its desire. In return, he displays renewed reverence to the everyday ethical acts that, contrary to threatening the survival of classics, secure their place in history. "

A Saving Skepticism: On J. M. Coetzee’s “The Pole - Los Angeles Review of Books - Jasmine Liu

"Like all of Mr. Coetzee’s best books, The Pole is a textual echo chamber—gesturing to Dante, Don Quixote, George Sand and even Mr. Coetzee’s own novel Disgrace—that never feels smothered by its allusions. Quick, deft, stimulating, stripped-down but unexpectedly moving, it’s a return to form by a writer who can make music from the fewest possible notes."

Wall Street Journal - Sam Sacks

"The writer who reinvents the rules of the genre in which he writes is an outlaw. . . . Coetzee has been an outlaw novelist since 1973."

Benjamin Ogden

"With The Pole, Coetzee, ever enigmatic, plays slowly, deliberately, with a delicate nuance that continues to impress."

World Literature Today - J.R. Patterson

"[A]n unconventional Polish pianist is entranced by a woman more than two decades his junior; a relationship J.M. Coetzee elegantly shadows with that of Chopin and George Sand."

Vanity Fair

"Coetzee has been giving us lessons in beauty – a certain kind of beauty – for decades . . . The Pole shows that, at 83 years old, there is no diminishing of his talents. Long may he darken our pages with prose."

The Guardian - John Self

"[Coetzee] is a consummate withholder, one of the great masters of the unsaid and the inexplicit."

New York Review of Books - Fintan O’Toole

"In The Pole, Coetzee forges an autofiction of contemplation, in which thought and inquiry take precedence over melodrama — because time is running out."

Financial Times - Christian Lorentzen

"With The Pole, Coetzee muddies the waters of national purity with his trademark clarity . . . [T]he book approaches the politics of Polishness in true Coetzee fashion: with elegant elision, at such an angle as to be almost imperceptible . . . While some might read 'The Pole' as a love story that unfolds across a language barrier, it is at its heart a novel about language that can be told only through a love plot . . . The novel presents words and what we desire to say as two points on a map, as far apart as the poles. To confront the distance between them is daunting, but love pushes us along."

The New Yorker - Jennifer Wilson

"[A] svelte and melancholy novel… for a book that draws so heavily on the language and subject matter of music, The Pole remains remarkably quiet. This quietude…proves Coetzee’s masterstroke."

Chicago Review of Books - Ellie Ebberlie

"[H]aunting and surreptitiously heartfelt… In an age of virtue signaling, Coetzee has the courage to bypass every fashionable position and reassurance and, by so doing, in The Pole, to catch some emotional truth, about loneliness and bewilderment and need, that really pierces... [As] soon as I completed it, I wanted to go back and read the whole elliptical thing again…"

AirMail - Pico Iyer

"Coetzee . . . writes with a scalpel-like economy of effect; his sentences are coiled springs, and the energy they release would take other writers pages to summon."

The New Yorker - Daphne Merkin

Colin Mace portrays the two seniors in this novel. Wittold Walccyzkiecz, a Polish pianist specializing in Chopin, falls in love with the woman who organized his concert in Barcelona. With skill and empathy, Mace uses pauses, changes in pitch, and emphasis as he navigates the complicated plot. Wittold's pursuit of Beatriz is deliberate and sensuous. Mace enhances the story's heartbreaking culmination with a sad and forlorn tone that suggests what might have been. Is there an expiration date on love? Coetzee says no, and Mace's narration illuminates a love story that transcends death. R.O. © AudioFile 2023, Portland, Maine

NOVEMBER 2023 - AudioFile

2023-07-13
A droll novel that skips lightly across serious matters—art and death and love.

There’s a playfulness from the outset of this slim work by the Nobel Prize–winning Coetzee. “The woman is the first to give him trouble, followed soon afterwards by the man,” it begins. The woman, we soon learn, is Beatriz, a board member of the music series that has brought the man to Barcelona. The man is the title character, a Polish pianist “whose name has so many w’s and z’s in it that no one on the board even tries to pronounce it—they refer to him simply as ‘the Pole.’ ” Which leaves “him,” and that would be the novelist, who presents himself as not creating these two characters but chronicling them, perhaps channeling them, as if they have hearts of their own. The pianist is known for his idiosyncratic readings of his countryman Chopin, though he falls well short of a virtuoso’s renown. Just as he is not an extraordinary musician, she is not an extraordinary listener. She seems to be doing her civic duty, as some women of a certain age and income might. She will soon be turning 50; he’s almost a quarter-century older. “Surely, at his age, he will not expect sex,” she thinks, even before her obligatory first meeting with him, which appears inconsequential. But why is she even thinking of that? She is a married woman, though she and her husband pretty much lead separate, sexless lives. And when the Pole subsequently reveals that she has become his obsession, she isn’t sure how she feels or how to respond. Why her? He seems to have something of a Dante-Beatrice fixation, and his obsession with her changes his life. And hers too. Love and art can do that.

Coetzee seems to be having some compassionate fun, and so will the reader.

Kirkus Reviews