The Pole

One of Vanity Fair's "Best Books of the Fall" From the Nobel Prize-winning author of Disgrace, a psychologically probing, compulsively readable novel about love and the mutability of human relationships.

"Like all of Mr. Coetzee’s best books, The Pole is a textual echo chamber—gesturing to Dante, Don Quixote, George Sand and even Mr. Coetzee’s own novel Disgrace—that never feels smothered by its allusions. Quick, deft, stimulating, stripped-down but unexpectedly moving, it’s a return to form by a writer who can make music from the fewest possible notes."

"With The Pole, Coetzee muddies the waters of national purity with his trademark clarity . . . [T]he book approaches the politics of Polishness in true Coetzee fashion: with elegant elision, at such an angle as to be almost imperceptible . . . While some might read 'The Pole' as a love story that unfolds across a language barrier, it is at its heart a novel about language that can be told only through a love plot . . . The novel presents words and what we desire to say as two points on a map, as far apart as the poles. To confront the distance between them is daunting, but love pushes us along."

"Coetzee has been giving us lessons in beauty – a certain kind of beauty – for decades . . . The Pole shows that, at 83 years old, there is no diminishing of his talents. Long may he darken our pages with prose."

"In The Pole, Coetzee forges an autofiction of contemplation, in which thought and inquiry take precedence over melodrama — because time is running out."

"[A] masterclass in the ‘late style’ at its best . . . among the pleasures of ‘The Pole’ are the layers it reveals. It is a book not only of the living but also of the dead. What does love mean? Coetzee wants us to consider. And memory — what consolations can it offer when we know it doesn’t last? . . . In this deeply moving novel, Coetzee reminds us of what we wish we didn’t have to remember: that everything dissolves."

"[H]aunting and surreptitiously heartfelt… In an age of virtue signaling, Coetzee has the courage to bypass every fashionable position and reassurance and, by so doing, in The Pole, to catch some emotional truth, about loneliness and bewilderment and need, that really pierces... [As] soon as I completed it, I wanted to go back and read the whole elliptical thing again…"

"The Pole serves as an excellent microcosm of the human condition—scrutinizing, sharp, and delicate. . . . Contemplative and careful, this seemingly unassuming story will stick with the reader long after the last page is finished, as a stunning ending forces a reconsideration of all that preceded it."

"Coetzee’s prose is certainly economical. It avoids embellishment of any kind—adjectives, appositions, repetitions. And, in that it avoids ambiguity, it is not poetic. Its main purpose is to render the muddle and fog of experience with clarity and fluency, and in his later works Coetzee achieves this with the sprezzatura of an Old Master. There’s not a sentence in The Pole that isn’t crystal clear. And it flows with such grace that you could read it from beginning to end while standing propped up against the mantelpiece."

"[A] surprisingly tender new book."

"In The Pole [Coetzee] moves beyond rendering the opacity of the beloved to suggest how love transforms the object of its desire. In return, he displays renewed reverence to the everyday ethical acts that, contrary to threatening the survival of classics, secure their place in history."

"[A] svelte and melancholy novel… for a book that draws so heavily on the language and subject matter of music, The Pole remains remarkably quiet. This quietude…proves Coetzee’s masterstroke."

"With The Pole, Coetzee, ever enigmatic, plays slowly, deliberately, with a delicate nuance that continues to impress."

"[A]n unconventional Polish pianist is entranced by a woman more than two decades his junior; a relationship J.M. Coetzee elegantly shadows with that of Chopin and George Sand."

"Exquisitely elevating the fundamental influences of music and language, The Pole unequivocally affirms the often enigmatic relationships among art, love, and human experience."

"[R]ich and engrossing . . . The prose is unornamented but nevertheless consistently incisive. Coetzee’s ability to render the human condition in all its vagaries is as masterful as ever."

"The writer who reinvents the rules of the genre in which he writes is an outlaw. . . . Coetzee has been an outlaw novelist since 1973."

"Coetzee may turn out to be one of the last great novelists, exalted by the intensity of his self-awareness and his willingness to make his home in a spiritual and intellectual impasse of which few of his contemporaries were even aware."

"[Coetzee] is a consummate withholder, one of the great masters of the unsaid and the inexplicit."

Born in Cape Town, South Africa, J. M. Coetzee is the author of more than twenty books, including The Pole; Waiting for the Barbarians; Life and Times of Michael K, for which Coetzee was awarded the Booker Prize; Boyhood: Scenes from a Provincial Life; and several essay collections. With his novel Disgrace, Coetzee became the first author to win the Booker Prize twice. In 2003, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature.