JM
Coetzee has won the Booker Prize twice - plus
the Nobel Prize for Literature (although that
was shortly after his last novel Elizabeth
Costello failed to graduate from that year's
Booker longlist to the shortlist).
Despite this track record, his new novel, Slow
Man (Secker & Warburg, £16.99),
also failed to make the Booker cut this year.
Why? There's a straightforward answer, and she's
still called Elizabeth Costello.
The first 78 pages of this 263 page novel are
terrific. Paul Rayment, a solitary divorced man
on the verge of retirement, born in
France
, now living in
Australia
, is knocked off his bicycle, in the very first
line: "The blow catches him from the right,
sharp and surprising and painful, like a bolt
of electricity..." |
|
  |
 |
|
| The two-time Booker
Prize winner is way off beam this year, says david
sexton |
|
|
Rayment passes out and comes to in hospital where
he learns, in a fuzz of anaethesia, that his right
leg is to be amputated above the knee. His active,
independent life is over. He has entered a world in
which he is going to need care, a "zone of humiliation".
Despite the spartan, disaffected prose, Coetzee (an
obsessive cyclist now living in Australia) describes
this initial trauma with great immediacy. Rayment becomes
disgusted with his body. "To himself he does not
call it a stump... If he has a name for it, it is le
jambon."
He feels his life has been wasted. He is "the
ghost of a man looking back in regret on time not well
used". Above all, he regrets having no family.
Then he meets his home care nurse, Marijana, Mrs
Jokic, a  |
