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.

Locos - Felipe Alfau

One must bear in mind that these people are creating their own life and standards, and are still novices at the game. In other words, the reader is expected to sit back and watch this procession of strange people and distorted phenomena without even a critical eye. To look for anything else, or to take seriously this bevy of irresponsible puppets and the inconsistency of the author, would not be advisable, as by doing so and imagining things that might lend themselves to misinterpretation, the reader would only disclose, beneath a more or less entertaining comedy of meaningless gestures, the vulgar aspects of a common tragedy.

Let us, then, take the author at his word, and consider this book of stories without even a critical eye, treat it as an amusement akin to watching a TV show of which you are not particularly fond, heedlessly dipping into a narrative arc of which you are unaware, considering each episode as a self-contained thing, the characters and the events imprisoned within the small portion of time that you bestow upon each story your disinterested attention. So, one day, you might read the story of a professional beggar, who goes out each day dressed in his uniform of rags, only to come home at night not to some hovel on the street, but a well-appointed apartment in a luxury apartment building. On another day you might read the story of a fingerprint expert, who is so convinced that fingerprints don't lie, that he allows himself to be put in prison for a murder he did not commit, simply because his fingerprints were found at the scene of the crime. Or on another day you might read the story of the woman who is so obsessed with death that she dies each year for a month or two at a time, only to rise again, until her obsession threatens to leave her dead for more time than she is alive, so she must attempt to commit suicide to cure herself of her obsession. There are eight such stories, each with its own quirky premise, each with strange twists of narrative, each with characters, as the title suggests, who are crazy. And as Alfau asserts, each story can be read alone and not in relation to the others that are told. Careless reading is the preferred mode of consumption. If you read the book in this way, the stories are entertaining, original in their conception and amusing in execution, a warm entertainment for some cold and lonely evening, bed time stories perfect for passing the time before sleep. In other words, light reading.

But, then, should you take such disclaimers seriously? It recalls Montaigne's blithe ironic pose: "...and there is no reason why you should waste your leisure on so frivolous and unrewarding a subject." Alfau admits that there is some method to the book's madness, and that the "pages have been numbered clearly and the stories arranged less clearly in a conventional order" which he finds more or less appropriate. So what is the reader to make of the fact that the stories tend to share the same characters, that they each reference a shared pool of events, that there is a tenuous thread that seems to connect each of the narratives? Most curious of all, though, is the author's presence in every story, his insistence on the distinction between real people and the characters he sets in motion, his frequent protestations that he is not to blame for his characters' actions. He admits in the prologue that he has completely lost control. All of this seems to beg for a more careful reading of the book, an attempt to get at what, exactly, he means by the common tragedy that underlies this comedy of gestures.

Complications set in immediately. If you step back and try to consider the work as a whole, attempt to see the novel that is constructed of these eight stories and the curious prologue, the impression made is one of a mound of pieces from several disparate puzzles. Nothing fits. Characters shift. Time, seemingly, does not exist. In one story a woman named Lunarito is a murderer, in another she is the victim of some murder. In one story a poet named Garcia is a crass and opportunistic young man, in another, in the same time period, he is an unhappy and sensitive child. One character actively takes over the telling of one of the stories and becomes confused, wondering whether he is a real being or some fictional entity, and despairs when he comes to the conclusion that he is neither. In another, a real person seeks to become more real by becoming a character in a story. There is a curious logic at work, a vague understanding on the part of the reader that although nothing seems to make sense, there is a key just waiting to be found. But as you, the ambitious reader, try to sort and sift the puzzle pieces, and unlock this curious jewelry box of a novel, just as you think you discover a key to the lock, the lock disappears. It is not dream-like, though it shares that uneasiness of purpose that dreams seem to embody. It is not a mystery, although you feel like a detective tracking down leads, establishing alibis, positing schemes.

Ultimately, it seems the tragedy Alfau refers to is one of creating stories, of crafting coherent tales, but that statement seems to miss the mark in so many ways. It is not a story about stories, it is not a novel about writing. In the end, in much the same way that At Swim-Two-Birds, the Flann O'Brien novel in which characters band together and plot against their author, it is an amusing tale of the richness of the imagination. And even that sentiment, in the face of this wonderful book, seems to fall flat.