The Pole is a 72-year-old virtuoso pianist, interpreter of Chopin which he takes care to play without sentimentality. Invited to perform in Barcelona, he was hosted for dinner after the concert by Beatriz, 20 years his junior.
The Spaniard doesn’t like the Pole at all: “What a poseur! What an old buffoon!” We remember the famous incipit ofAurélienAragon’s masterpiece, a great novel about non-love and the impossibility of the couple: “The first time Adrien saw Bérénice, he found her frankly ugly. She displeased him, finally.” Here too the Pole displeases Beatriz.
She thinks she’ll be discharged the same evening but he sends her emails, CDs, and offers to accompany her on tour in Brazil. He sees Beatriz as a symbolic first name, becoming his Dante. “His Beatrice never gave him a single word and yet he loved her all his life”he told him.
gullA paradox: we simultaneously love a mortal body and an immortal soul.
Coetzee has fun telling the story of a failed love story, a lousy dialogue, all the more difficult since the Pole doesn’t speak Spanish and has poor command of English.
Mysterology
However, for a short moment, this married woman, not wanting to give in to this insistent pianist, changed her mind. And when the Pole is invited to play in Majorca, she offers him accommodation in the house she owns on the island. And she said to him: “I won’t close the door. If you feel alone during the night and want to stop by, don’t hesitate.”
Under the‘innocuous appearance of the novel, Coetzee, as a surgeon of the soul, dissects the twists and turns of the heart. What is love? Lacan said that love is also the desire to be desired. Is this why Beatriz gives in for a moment to the desire of the Pole who pursues her with his love? Or is it pity? Coetzee asks: “Why does she keep thinking about the Pole? It’s a question of things that are missing, and for the things that are missing, there is no science yet, apparently. Mysterology? Mysteronomy?”
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It is also a novel about incommunicability, the difference between the languages they speak adding to the confusion of feelings.
The Pole and Beatriz will only have three nights together before separating. Forever ? Not entirely, because beyond his death, the Pole still sends him poems – “not great”– that he left for her, in Polish.
The Polish is a short story which is also a reflection on music and on the passion, even the most unreasonable, that one can still nourish at the end of one’s life.
⇒ The Polish | Novel | JM Coetzee, translated from English by Sabine Porte | Threshold, 151 pp., €18, digital €13
EXTRACT
“A sheet or a frame, like in the Greek story, a bed that grinds your limbs until you conform to the ideal that someone else projects onto you. Perhaps the Pole, with his big hands and long legs, was he too twisted and crushed into a frame.”
