The Pole

I own books by the Nobel- and twice-Booker winner Coetzee on my shelf (largely because I collect these orange Penguin editions) but this short novel is first I've read from the South African author. Listening to this book felt like an intellectual exercise: the Pole of the title is an aging pianist who visits Barcelona to perform works by Chopin. While there he meets Beatriz, a middle-aged socialite who volunteers with the Concert Circle, the organization that hosts the Pole. (They call him "the Pole" because the Spaniards of the Concert Circle don't even try to correctly pronounce all the consonants in the man's Polish name.) Beatriz and the Pole converse only briefly, and in English—which neither of them speaks fluently—so Beatriz is stunned when, months after his departure, she receives a flirtatious message from the man. And as a reader I was likewise stunned to see the two enter into an affair—though that isn't really what the story is about. I feel like a literature seminar could spend a semester unpacking everything this book has to say about place, language, translation, and love—and Dante and his Beatrice. Narrated by Colin Mace.