The core of the novel, he says, “comes from the time the novelist George Sand and Frédéric Chopin spent together in Mallorca, where composed most of his preludes.” He is referring to 18, when the lovers spent a few months on the island. When asked about his experience of Spain, Coetzee recalls: “I’ve spent some time in Barcelona and Girona, but I can’t say I know them well.” And Mallorca? “Everything I know about the island comes from my reading.
However, it is Beatrice who leads the poet Dante through Purgatory and Paradise towards his vision of the divine. The type of love that is celebrated in Dante’s New Life – strongly influenced by the cult of courtly love, which in turn derived from the cult of the Virgin Mary – is already so distant in our present, its fusion between the erotic and the religious, is practically incomprehensible. It also describes good ways to love and bad ways to love, while recreating the myth of Dante and Beatrice. In your novel, you talk about love, peace and compassion. Coetzee’s many layers are tidily included in a trim work of 138 pages. The Pole’s infatuation – his return to Catalonia to see her and the visit he makes to the island of Mallorca – gives the novel an inexhaustible palette of sensations, from blind love to compassion, from mistrust to loyalty. For him, however, everything has just begun. For Beatrice, the relationship ends there – she hasn’t enjoyed the concert and doesn’t connect with the pianist’s supposed talent for playing Chopin’s oeuvre. An older couple joins them, serving as a mirror for the reader to get to know the protagonists more deeply. Later, as a courtesy – and without much enthusiasm – she takes him out to dinner. In The Pole, the main character, Beatrice, has asked the pianist to give a concert in Barcelona. His work has travelled even farther, from those early novels depicting the narrow-mindedness and breadth of racism and apartheid to his latest story set in Spain. He has lived in the United Kingdom, the United States and, currently, he resides in Australia. He has lived and been trained in multiple places and disciplines: he studied English Literature, but also mathematics and computing.
The author, who was born in Cape Town in 1940, has never conformed or limited himself to the South African reality, whose description earned him the Nobel Prize.
But the symbolism of publishing in the South before the North is important to me.” ”I’m not sure that following this procedure has had any practical consequences. “They have appeared in Argentina and Australia before in Great Britain or the United States.” “I have specifically published my three most recent novels in the Southern Hemisphere,” he explained to EL PAÍS via email. His latest novel is titled The Pole, published first in Spanish as El polaco by the Argentinian publishing house El Hilo de Ariadna. Coetzee – who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2003 – has recreated and updated Dante’s passion for Beatrice, in the form of a relationship between a Polish pianist in his seventies and a forty-something woman from Barcelona. She accompanied the Italian poet to all the purgatories and paradises that he described. This is just the appetizer of a text about Dante’s love for Beatrice. I say truly that the vital spirit, which lives in the most secret chamber of the heart, began to tremble so violently that I felt it fiercely… from then on I say that governed my soul.” Dante Alighieri defined falling in love in his first known work, The New Life (1294) in such a lyrical and simple way that, centuries later, it continues to hold value.
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