Slow Man by J.M. Coetzee

"The blow catches him from the right, sharp and surprising and painful, like a bolt of electricity, lifting him up off the bicycle. Relax! he tells himself as he flies through the air (flies through the air with the greatest of ease!), and indeed he can feel his limbs go obediently slack. Like a cat he tells himself: roll, then spring to your feet, ready for what comes next. The unusual word limber or limbre is on the horizon too.

"That is not quite as it turns out, however. Whether because his legs disobey or because he is for a moment stunned (he hears rather than feels the impact of his skull on the bitumen, distant, wooden, like a mallet-blow), he does not spring to his feet at all, but on the contrary slides metre after metre, on and on, until he is quite lulled by the sliding.

"He lies stretched out, at peace. It is a glorious morning. The sun's touch is kind. There are worse things than letting oneself go slack, waiting for one's strength to return. In fact there might be worse things than having a quick nap. He closes his eyes; the world tilts beneath him, rotates; he goes absent."

So begins Slow Man, a book that I will press on everyone I know. These first three paragraphs are a good representation of the book's style. It is formal yet playful, austere yet warm. Each word pulls its own weight, and it's as if they are being used for the first time, presented afresh in all their wondrous glory.

The man in the accident is Paul Rayment, an elderly, bookish, solitary type. He finds himself in the hospital, at the mercy of a young, efficient surgeon who amputates his leg. He is discharged, and left to fend for himself in his lonely apartment. He goes to physical therapy sessions, hires a nurse, but it doesn't stop the gloom from settling in. He is a cripple; his life as he knew it is over.

A new nurse comes into his life, an immigrant from Croatia. He discovers that he is falling in love with her, and the gloom begins to lift. This part of the book is heart-wrenching -- I must have been quite a sight on the subway, literally wincing with pain, and every so often slamming the covers shut. There were many sharp intakes of breath and whispered pleas to the main character. I also found myself laughing out loud (which never fails to irritate me when other people on the subway do it), a welcome novelty for a Coetzee book.

And then, about one-third of the way through, someone new appears on Paul's doorstep: Elizabeth Costello. Yes, Elizabeth Costello, the titular character of another Coetzee book, who, if the rumors swirling among Coetzee watchers are to be believed, could possibly be the alter ego of the great man himself. Costello, a renowned writer, impishly inserts herself into Paul's affairs. It turns out that she may or may not be the author of all that is happening, and may or may not be in total control of her characters, a la At Swim-Two-Birds.

My reaction to this development was swift and unequivocal: What have you done? No one wants to play your stupid postmodern games! Give me back the touching story of the crippled, solitary man who finds love in the autumn of his life! We hates Elizabeth Costello, we wants our precious!

Etc. But it turns out that the games are a great deal of fun. And the book remains, to the end, utterly gripping.

Howards End by E.M. Forster

"'Somehow, when that kind of man looks frightened it is too awful. It is all right for us to be frightened, or for men of another sort--Father, for instance; but men like that! When I saw all the others so placid, and Paul mad with terror in case I said the wrong thing, I felt for a moment that the whole Wilcox family was a fraud, just a wall of newspapers and motor-cars and golf-clubs, and that if it fell I should find nothing behind it but panic and emptiness.'"

At first glance, it would seem that Forster's Howards End, the story of two English families at the turn of the twentieth century, bears little resemblance to A Passage to India, a later work set in India during the height of Britain's colonial supremacy. The latter, while tenderly exploring the lives of its characters, is set against a backdrop of epochal events, and the entanglements that arise between Englishman and Indian are the ripple-like repercussions of a broader clash of civilizations. Howards End, on the other hand, describes a clash of a much smaller scale: that between the upper-middle class and the middle-middle class.

Typically English! you might cry. So inexplicably obsessed with the fine gradations of class! But while Howards End is concerned with quintessentially English dilemmas, and is more humble in historical and geographic scope, it bears similarities to its worldly successor. It is perhaps even more disturbing, suggesting that the fathomless mystery of the other can reveal itself not only in far-flung places, but right next door, amongst one's countrymen.

Howards End is the name of a house, and serves as a symbol of England as a whole. The claim to this property becomes a contest between the practical-minded and business-sound Wilcoxes and the idealistic and art-obsessed Schlegels. The Wilcoxes have their hands on "all the ropes" of the material world; the Schlegels a deep dedication to the more nebulous world of human relationships. In their dealings with each other, as well as with the pitiable clerk Leonard Bast (a representative of the lower-middle class), we see the hypocrisies and strengths of the warring clans. As Virgina Woolf puts it, the story is a "struggle between the things that matter and the things that do not matter, between reality and sham, between the truth and the lie." Forster accomplishes this all with humor, keen observation and great feeling.

Beneath it all is the terror that comes from gaining a glimpse of another's life. It is a threat to the fortresses we make of our beliefs; it is the shaking of the earth under one's feet. The most famous scene in Passage to India occurs at the Marabar Caves, where Mrs. Moore, new to the country, hears a disconcerting echo in one of the caves. It is a sound that is beyond language, beyond understanding; to her it sounds like "boum." What this "boum" means remains vague, but we know it shatters the foundation upon which she has built her life, a foundation that began to crack when she came into contact with an alien culture. Reading Howards End, perhaps we can put words to that sound: panic and emptiness, panic and emptiness.