The Pole by J. M. Coetzee EPUB & PDF – eBook Details Online
- Status: Available for Free Download
- Author: J. M. Coetzee
- Language: English
- Genre: City Life Fiction
- Format: PDF / EPUB
- Size: 2 MB
- Price: Free
1. The woman is the first to give him trouble, followed soon afterwards
by the man.
2. At the beginning he has a perfectly clear idea of who the woman is.
She is tall and graceful; by conventional standards she may not qualify as a
beauty but her features—dark hair and eyes, high cheekbones, full mouth—
are striking and her voice, a low contralto, has a suave attractive power.
Sexy? No, she is not sexy, and certainly not seductive. She might have been
sexy when she was young—how can she not have been with a figure like
that?—but now, in her forties, she goes in for a certain remoteness. She
walks—one notices this particularly—without swinging her hips, gliding
across the floor erect, even stately.
That is how he would sum up her exterior. As for her self, her soul, there
is time for that to reveal itself. Of one thing he is convinced: she is a good
person, kind, friendly.
3. The man is more troublesome. In concept, again, he is perfectly clear.
He is a Pole, a man of seventy, a vigorous seventy, a concert pianist best
known as an interpreter of Chopin, but a controversial interpreter: his
Chopin is not at all Romantic but on the contrary somewhat austere, Chopin
as inheritor of Bach. To that extent he is an oddity on the concert scene, odd
enough to draw a small but discerning audience in Barcelona, the city to
which he has been invited, the city where he will meet the graceful, softspoken woman.
But barely has the Pole emerged into the light than he begins to change.
With his striking mane of silver hair, his idiosyncratic renderings of Chopin,
the Pole promises to be a distinct enough personage. But in matters of soul,
of feeling, he is troublingly opaque. At the piano he plays with soul,
undeniably; but the soul that rules him is Chopin’s, not his own. And if that
soul strikes one as unusually dry and severe, it may point to a certain aridity
in his own temperament.
4. Where do they come from, the tall Polish pianist and the elegant
woman with the gliding walk, the banker’s wife who occupies her days in
good works? All year they have been knocking at the door, wanting to be let
in or else dismissed and laid to rest. Now, at last, has their time come?
5. The invitation to the Pole comes from a Circle that stages monthly
recitals in the Sala Mompou, in Barcelona’s Gothic Quarter, and has been
doing so for decades. The recitals are open to the public, but tickets are
expensive and the audience tends to be wealthy, aging, and conservative in
its tastes.
The woman in question—her name is Beatriz—is a member of the board
that administers the series. She performs this role as a civic duty, but also
because she believes that music is good in itself, as love is good, or charity,
or beauty, and good furthermore in that it makes people better people.
Though well aware that her beliefs are naive, she holds to them anyway.
She is an intelligent person but not reflective.
For More Read Download This Book
EPUB