Coetzee keeps amazing us with his generous mind, his stylistic skills and his sense of balance in telling a story. The central story in this novella is Beatriz, a Spanish woman in her late fourties, who invites a 70-year old Polish pianist for a recital in Barcelona. An unlikely relationship buids up, including a joint holiday, and a trip to Poland. Things turn a little awkward - it actually was from the start - yet human and tender at the same time. There is something paradoxical in their relationship: tender and distant, adventurous and cautious, shameful and irresistible, selfish and altruist ... the ideal field of tension for a great novelist to thrive in. There is no real narrator, but the distant author himself, who literally enumerates - yes, with numbered paragraphs - in a very descriptive way what is happening, as if he is observing his characters from a distance.
"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?"
The "other stories" in the book are all about Coetzee's Elisabeth Costello, whom we of course know from the novel with the same name. The fact that she is also a woman with adult children gives a sense of coherence to the entire book.
Easy to recommend.
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