Book Review: The Pole. By J. M. Coetzee. New York: Liveright, An Imprint of W.W. Norton & Company, 2023,  176 pp., $17.99 paperback.

My first impression of The Pole, a 2023 novel by the Nobel Prize–winning South African author J. M. Coetzee, was that the volume itself had a peculiar appearance. It is notably thin for a novel and divided into six “books” of varying length, each prefaced by a page displaying a handwritten musical composition, possibly Chopin.

But the oddest feature is the enumeration of subsections, a sequence beginning anew for each book. These numbered components individually encompass a separate idea, change, or event. Some of the segments are of substantial length, while others are only one line, a single sentence or a phrase. To this reader, a slender volume with a prominent numbering scheme implicitly suggests aging. This could be a book about the numbered final days of life.

Then there is the title. One soon finds that “the Pole” is indeed a man with a name, but a name with many consonants that render it nearly unpronounceable (Witold Walczykiewicz). Moreover, referring to him as “the Pole,” which is done mostly in the early pages of the novel, has a distancing tone; he is unmistakably an “other.” Whether or not they are intended by the author, theories are naturally created by readers to explain the eccentric format of the book and the initial reluctance to engage with the Pole as fully human.

The Pole himself, Witold, is a 70-year-old pianist who specializes in performing the work of his countryman, Frédéric Chopin. He has an off-putting appearance—very tall and thin, with an ungovernable shock of

gray hair and a facial expression that belies precise description but is decidedly not joyful. He is of middling fame and reputation as a musician, good enough to be