Last things

The aphorist Georg Christoph Lichtenberg likened reviews to ‘a kind of childhood illness to which newborn books are subject to a greater or lesser degree’, like measles or mumps, which kill a few but leave the rest only mildly marked. But how should we consider reviews of books that come late in an author’s career? In instances such as these, the reviewer is tempted to avoid any chance of career-ending pneumonia, applying a nurse’s gentling touch to the text. Often the result is career summation, a soft peddle at indications of decline.

The Pole is a collection of short fiction (or rather, one novella large enough to draw a number of narrative asteroids into its gravitational field) which refutes the assumptions of that palliative approach. At the age of eighty-three, Coetzee has produced a book in which the waning of the writer’s powers is masterfully anticipated: incorporated, even, into the structure and concerns of the stories it contains. It is a collection, moreover, whose intensities are only sharpened by the proximity of death. Coetzee’s gaze, in a manner that only Tolstoy and a few other writers might realise, is unblinkingly directed here towards last things.

The Pole takes the author’s perennial concerns (particularly those dealing with our treatment of animals – four stories relate to Elizabeth Costello) and reworks them in minimalist form. Alberto Giacometti’s sculptural output during World War II was apparently so winnowed by circumstance and aesthetic design that it fitted into a matchbox. The Pole and Other Stories does something similar for Coetzee’s long career.