Sometimes reading something will allow you to look at what is so familiar to you with new eyes as if you are seeing it for the first time.
I became very much aware of this while reading the novels of J.M. Coetzee. For instance, the young student he describes in the opening of his award-winning Disgrace, is possibly a Cape Malay. So, for that matter, is the prostitute he visits in the very beginning of the book (such a harsh word ‘prostitute’, but what other word can I use?)
Then, in Summertime, his most recent novel, he introduces another Malay woman, this time Mrs Noerdien who works with his father in Acme Spare Parts or something as a bookkeeper. Being a writer myself, I am always interested in how authors introduce their female protagonists, and especially at what stage of the unfolding of the novel.
Thomas Mann, in his Magic Mountain introduces his Mme Chauchat only after something like 200 pages. Next he introduces a parenthesis of, God, something like 300 pages after the hero (if that is the word) Hans Castorp first sets eyes on her and then finally addresses her during the New Year’s Eve party in the chapter entitled Walpurgishnacht. Oh, in between there are moments that are poignant, of course, and which serve to intensify the sense of anticipation ... eyes resting on each other from a distance ... a faint look of curiousity ... a nose bleed following a haunting dream of an incident that occurred in childhood ... lessons in early Freud, about the connection between love being an ilness: things like that.
I wish I had copy to hand, but unfortunately my copy has been packed away.
At any rate, you wait a long time. Thomas Mann, in his encyclopaedic way, transformed the way I thought of Russian women, much in the same way that Turgenev did, although on second thoughts that is not strictly speaking true because there was something deeply mysterious about Mme Chauchat, with her Kirghish eyes and her unfathomable heart. What she had in common with the principal female characters of Turgenev is that they are not terribly impressed with the men who adore them.
Similarly, when J.M. Coetzee introduces Mrs Noerdien, she does not seem in the least interested in him:
"The next day, on his way to Acme, he is caught in a rainshower. He arrives sodden. The glass of the cubicle is fogged; he enters without knocking. His father is hunched over his desk. There is a second presence in the cubicle, a woman, young, gazelle-eyed, softly curved, in the act of putting on her raincoat.
He halts in his tracks, transfixed.
His father rises from his seat. “Mrs Noerdien, this is my son John.”
Mrs Noerdien averts her gaze, does not offer a hand. “I’ll go now,” she says in a low voice, addressing not him but his father."
The father makes them coffee. They continue to work at what appears to be a very mundane task, checking stock. It is a bookkeeping task. The son helps the father and they press on till 10 that night, until the father is clearly exhausted.
Walking back the son asks the father about Mrs Noerdien. The father is not a man of many words but he does divulge that Mrs Noerdien is ‘very meticulous’, perhaps the highest praise a bookkeeper could hope for. Even though several hours have passed since his first laying his eyes on Mrs Noerdien, it is clear that she has been on his mind. As they walk down a deserted Riebeeck Street, he continues to dwell on her:
"For that is the chief impression he carries away from his brush with her. He calls her feminine because he has no better word: the feminine, a higher rarefaction of the female, to the point of becoming spirit. With Mrs Noerdien, how would a man, how even would Mrs Noerdien, traverse the space from the exalted heights of the feminine to the earthly body of the female? To sleep with a being like that, to embrace such a body, to smell and taste it – what would it do to a man? And to be beside her all day, conscious of her slightest stirring: did his father’s sad response to Dr Schwarz’s lifestyle quiz – ‘Have relations with the opposite sex been a source of satisfaction to you? “No’ – have something to do with coming face to face, in the wintertime of his life, with beauty such as he has not known before and can never hope to possess?"
This scene occurs towards the end of the book and I sense we will have to wait till the next ‘autobiographical’ novel is released before we will learn more about Mrs Noerdien and the fate of the author. It is, I admit, a bit of cliffhanger. Just as, in the Magic Mountain where we had to wait hundreds of pages before our hero finally gets to meet Mme Chauchat, we will now again have to wait a long time.
