James Purdon at Literary Review:
Having appeared last year as a standalone novel in a Spanish translation by Mariana Dimópoulos, ‘The Pole’ continues Coetzee’s recent preference for publishing first in languages other than English, as do three more of the six stories collected here (the two exceptions are the Elizabeth Costello story ‘As a Woman Grows Older’ and the brief concluding tale ‘The Dog’, a minimalist piece that amplifies a theme from 1999’s Disgrace). Late in life, Coetzee has emerged as a self-consciously global novelist, whose disquiet at the dominance of the English language in which he writes has profoundly affected the ethical as well as the aesthetic dimensions of his fiction. Appropriately, then, ‘The Pole’ is a story about the difficulties of communicating across the barriers between languages, sexes, generations – and across the hard gap that divides the dead from the living. It’s also a story about legacies, both personal and literary, and Coetzee alludes liberally to his own earlier work as well as that of other writers. The elegant, self-regarding Beatriz seems a distant relation not only of her namesake in Dante (another banker’s wife), but also of those society women who, in T S Eliot’s ‘Portrait of a Lady’, flock ‘to hear the latest Pole/Transmit the Preludes, through his hair and finger-tips’.
more here.