250 pages or less
Worthwhile reads to fit busy student schedules

-- Kristin Johnson, Literary Critic

Slow Man ponders life’s larger questions
Fiction
Slow Man
By: J.M. Coetzee
Publisher: Viking, Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 263 pages, hardcover $24.95, September 2005.
First Thoughts: Poignant novel by seasoned writer tackles how one man strives for meaning, deals with regret and longs for love and a home.

I anxiously waited for this book by Nobel Prize-winning author J.M. Coetzee (he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2003.) I had read and loved Disgrace a year ago and knew this latest novel would not disappoint. You may have noticed I am breaking the 250-page barrier with this review. This is because I want readers to take note of this important voice in today’s literature, and if you have to stop at 250 pages, feel free. But you won’t want to because you’ll miss the satisfying end of this book about how one man in Australia lived his life.

Sixty-year-old photographer Paul Rayment is riding his bike when he is struck by a car. His life is spared, but, as a result of the accident, Rayment loses most of a leg, making him an amputee. The once-solitary photographer is forced to seek help from others with his most basic of needs. Faced with this new dependence, Rayment questions how he has lived his entire life. Should he have had children? Who will care for him when he is older? Will he find love? Is it better to be cared for or to be loved? How will he live with the new one-legged obstacle in his midst?

Rayment falls in love with his married-with-children nurse, Marijana (pronounced “Marianna”). Longing for someone out of his reach, he finds himself wanting to care for her and for her children, even if he cannot have her for himself. As he struggles with how to handle this longing, mysterious writer Elizabeth Costello, the main character in Coetzee’s novel of the same name, shows up on his doorstep. She challenges Rayment in this time of need and pushes him to make decisions and take action in his life more quickly. Rayment is suspicious of Costello’s motives and thinks she wants only to use him as a character in one of her books, but he indulges her anyway. It becomes apparent that Rayment’s new physical disability is only a more tangible definition of the inability and slowness he has exemplified his entire life in making decisions and connecting with others. If he wants relationships to materialize, is it too late for him?

Like a nemesis, Costello frequently pesters Rayment to act and take part in his own life: “Except that soon enough regret will start creeping in. His days will be cast over with a grey monotone. By night he will wake with a start, gnashing his teeth and muttering to himself If only, if only! Memory will eat away at him like an acid, the memory of his pusillanimity. Ah, Marijana! he will grieve. If only I had not let my Marijana get away! A man of sorrow, a shadow of himself, that is what he will become. To his dying day.”

Like many well-told stories, Slow Man raises questions, but does not tie up everything with neat answers. The reader will pause through this book and reflect on his or her own life while seeing life through Rayment’s eyes and situation.

J.M. Coetzee was born in South Africa and has lived in many places, including England, New York and Australia. He started his career as a computer programmer in England, but now is a writer and English professor. Since 2002, he has been a Distinguished Service Professor at the University of Chicago. In addition to his Nobel Prize, he was awarded the Booker Prize twice, once for Life and Times of Michael K. (1983) and again for Disgrace (1999).

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