Old age, eh? That’s kinda the theme for this collection of short stories by Sarth Ifrikan writer JM Coetzee.
The Pole is the longest story here, taking up nearly two-thirds of the book. An elderly Polish pianist falls for a slightly younger Spanish woman and woos her, old folks-style. It’s a realistic romance story where Coetzee doesn’t go for overblown melodrama, but the story is still quite predictable. And boring.
Around twenty years ago, Coetzee wrote a novel about an aging Australian novelist called Elizabeth Costello, and two of the stories here feature the same character - still old, still a novelist, still adamantly Aussie. I won’t go through the stories individually here but they all focus on elderly characters and their relationships with their adult children, and still retaining their agency despite their age.
Coetzee’s prose is fine - smooth, clear, easy to read, even enjoyable at times - but the stories just didn’t do anything for me. Maybe because I’m (luckily) decades away from the life stages the characters (and Coetzee) are in, but there wasn’t much in any of the stories that really grabbed my attention.
Or maybe Coetzee’s medium simply isn’t short stories? I’ve read and enjoyed two of his novels - Disgrace and Foe - which is odd for me as he’s a multi-award-winning writer and I usually don’t jibe with those. And he wouldn’t be the first novelist whose short stories didn’t measure up to his longer works; there are writers who are opposite in that regard too.
Either way, there’s nowt much special about The Pole and Other Stories and you’re not missing much by giving it a miss. But I do think his novels are quite something - definitely a writer worth looking into where his longer works are concerned.
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