in new book, Nobel Prize winner JM Coetzee meticulously investigates what we leave to the world

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It is interesting, at first glance, to see how Coetzee dismisses the mundane tension of someone else’s discovery of the lovers and favors the dynamics of the relationship. In the novel’s nearly 150 pages, what lies within is more interesting than the threat outside; The constant tension between Beatriz and the Pole is what keeps the story alive, whether in life or death – a story that promises promise from Witold’s introduction. Eccentric in the concert world, his Chopin is not romantic, quite the contrary, “he is a little austere, Chopin heir to Bach”. It doesn’t take long to realize that eccentricity goes beyond professional life, and from there perhaps emerges the driving force of the relationship with Beatriz, who at one point makes her husband understand: you prove that I can still make a good impression, but not enough. It is because of the strangeness of this relationship to the Pole, doubly displaced – in the world and between the parts which constitute it – that Coetzee’s novel seems to vibrate.

For the reader familiar with the work of the South African, the literary expedient mediated by the canon resurfaces, which was already fundamental in the recent “Jesus Trilogy”, imbued with Cervantes and Dostoyevsky, and which takes place here in the figure of the Dantesque Beatrice, nominally evoked with the necessary differences underlined, which is only another way of attesting to the adhesion of the matrix. And if we talk about the matrix, one of the pinnacles of Coetzee’s production, language, constantly appears in friction — Beatriz speaks Spanish, Witold, Polish, and both communicate in English. Of these broken mirrors, in which the reflection always distorts and eliminates something, remains the strangeness and the discrepancy that we mentioned in the first paragraph.

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The fact that ultimately Beatriz must unravel what Witold leaves her, poems in another language, is another piece of the picture opened by Coetzee, which also speaks of death and masculine decline. The first, when it presents itself, is not full of difficult anguish, which leads to an almost insurmountable implacability, but rather contains something of sweetness, in which the culmination of past events is reflected in a present which carries with it these same events, in an incessant march. It is the notion of movement, even slow – and here classical music has its weight – which seems to mark the prose of “O Polonês”, in the excellent translation by José Rubens Siqueira.

Male decline, on the other hand, does not occur in the same way as that of Philip Roth, for example, in whose books male decline also represented a society and was often accompanied by some exposure to ridicule; In this “The Pole”, the exit from the stage takes place on an individual level, and comes up against solitude – which brings us back to the breach.

More than an incommunicability, we should perhaps evoke the question that Beatriz asks herself at the end of page 30 and talk about a harsh resistance that crosses the links – let’s think of the fact that translation is one of the main axes of the novel and that it was first released in Spanish -, a way of approaching the world in which it is through art, whether music or literature, that the traces of language trace their trace, even if much remains fortunately outside. What remains at the end is therefore another element of a solid literary project; a careful and somewhat hurtful investigation, precisely because of the incomplete nature of what we leave to the world.

Mateus Baldi is a writer and master of literature (PUC-Rio), author of “The Years of Glass” (nós, 2025)