The Pole, by J.M. Coetzee

A graceful novel that elegantly describes the attraction of a thoughtful woman to an older man.

The story in The Pole is straightforward. An affluent woman almost fifty, Beatriz, who volunteers at the Concert Circle, agrees to entertain an esteemed Polish pianist in his seventies, Witold (referred to as the Pole), after his performance at the Concert Circle of his “historically authentic” version of Chopin. Beatriz’s first impression of the Pole when he walks onto the stage is that he is a “poseur,” and “old clown.” That opinion degrades during the dinner to which she escorts the Pole after the concert, and culminates during a taxi ride back to his hotel with her mild revulsion from the smell of “male sweat and eau de Cologne.” That should’ve been the end of her acquaintance with the Pole. But it was not, for a week letter she receives a package from the Pole which contains a CD with recordings of the Chopin Nocturnes and a note referring to her as an “angel.” And there begins an email correspondence, soon becoming the impetus for her visit to a conservatory in a town a train ride away, where he is a guest teacher, and finally his longer visit to her family vacation home in Mallorca where their relationship becomes an affair.

The plot in The Pole is everything but unique. It has all the elements of a complicated, even if conventional, romance novel: chance encounter, strained meetings between the protagonists, contradictory beliefs concerning life, estranged spouses, physical attraction consummated, and, finally, a death. What distinguishes the novel is Coetzee’s brilliant combination of the present tense with a third person point of view that is primarily omniscient, but for brief moments lapses in a close account by its omission of Beatriz’s thoughts in favor of only a rendition of her actions. Many of Coetzee’s earlier novels use the present tense but most of those are written in the first person, Waiting For The Barbarians being an example. The Pole is closer in form to Elizabeth Costello, whose primary protagonist, rendered in a third person point of view, is comparable to Beatriz. Yet The Pole has an intensity that is not as profound in Coetzee’s prior novels. This intensity grows out of deep incursions into the thoughts and feelings involved in the protagonists’ meetings, particularly when their relationship turns physical in Mallorca. At one point, Beatriz refers to Witold’s desire that they be together in the “next life” as “sentimental nonsense.” After Mallorca, she throws away his letters unread. And then, incongruously, she travels to Poland and finds his poems in his belongings meant for her. These she doesn’t burn. She has them translated and what follows after she reads them is an exquisite depiction of her inner self, not described or told but rendered observationally in her thoughts about an afterlife, which is no longer to her “sentimental nonsense.” What ends the novel are two imagined letters Beatriz writes to the Pole that contain some of the best prose Coetzee has ever written. They are the rose of his beautifully moving development of her character.

Coetzee is sometimes criticized for his novels leaning to the political. Arguably that is the case in Waiting For The Barbarians, which takes place in the imaginary Empire. And Elizabeth Costello is similar, as it is divided into eight lectures, each of which incorporates views that have political roots. The only politics in The Pole are the politics of the psyche. Brief mentions of current social issues are at times alluded to. The novel is entirely focused on issues of the heart, described by a woman who reluctantly and unexpectedly experiences a transcendent love with an old man.