At a dinner after the performance, Beatriz and Witold converse briefly in stilted English, neither’s first choice of language. It describes a romance between Beatriz, a fortysomething socialite in Barcelona, and Witold, a Polish pianist in his seventies who has been flown in from Berlin for a recital. Coetzee, is a love story that unfolds across a language barrier, and a novel about language that can be told only through a love plot. ![]() “The Pole,” the new novel by the South African writer J. ![]() They emerge as people in desperate want-for a daughter, in Ruth’s case a mother, in Lily’s-who find a way to make do without what they lack. Much of the novel depicts, with exquisite detail, the prosaic patterns of Ruth and Lily’s home life. It is one of the great charms of the book that Boyt’s descriptions of Ruth and Lily’s quotidian routines are so seductive. An unspoken agreement is established: Ruth will raise her granddaughter and Eleanor will visit when she can, which turns out to be infrequently and erratically. At the baby’s christening, Ruth gives Eleanor and her boyfriend four thousand pounds to take her granddaughter, Lily, home with for a week. When Eleanor announces that she’s pregnant, it’s a threat of grief compounded-one more life that risks being ruined. Yet Ruth’s pedagogical talents fail her when it comes to her own daughter, Eleanor, who left home at fifteen and suffers from a severe drug addiction. Ruth, the central figure of “ Loved and Missed,” the British writer Susie Boyt’s seventh novel, is a professional caretaker, a schoolteacher whose teen-age students look to her for guidance.
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