Word: marijana
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...pages) has been about the unraveling of retired photographer Paul Rayment in Adelaide. After his bicycle is clipped by a car, he loses first his leg, then his dignity and, perhaps, his mind. Dour of disposition and without family, he's drawn to his hot-blooded Croatian nurse, Marijana Jokic, whose troublesome brood he offers to support. At which point "the unattractively freckled, somewhat fleshy shoulders" of Elizabeth Costello appear up his stairs. Is she an authorial intervention? A meddling cupid? A cynic about his real intentions with the Jokics, whom she sees as more avaricious than angelic...
...When Elizabeth Costello commands Paul to "push the mortal envelope," he tries to oblige, virtually adopting Marijana's teenage son Drago and rescuing his sister Blanka from a brush with the law. But it's the pull to her push that gives the book its arresting comic edge. Like "scrupulous doubter" Coetzee himself, Paul doesn't totally believe in the merits of his tale: "I am not a hero, Mrs. Costello." The lady, of course, won't have a bar of it. She exhorts Paul to be a fictional hare rather than a tortoise: "Don Quixote is not about...
...Slow Man is not about the doing of great deeds. Coetzee's characters spend too much time questioning their own motives - like Paul, who begins to wonder if his charity towards the Jokics is motivated less by paternalism than by Marijana's shapely legs: "How does love work among the animals? ? Are there such things as shapely legs among lady spiders, and does their attractive force puzzle the male spider as it draws him in?" Paul will continue to ask such questions, and like her author's id, Elizabeth Costello will continue to sally forth. In this way, Slow...
...safe in Croatia, Marijana, 17, stuttered out the terrible events of last April. After raping her and her mother, Serb irregulars carried Marijana off to a camp in the forest, where she and a group of other women were raped repeatedly over several weeks. They finally freed her when she became pregnant; she vows, "I will not give birth." But her doctor says she is in her 20th week and an abortion is out of the question. No one at the hospital has been brave enough to tell her that...
Meyers said yesterday that "where legal issues are concerned, the medical consideration is only one aspect of the question." NORML however, feels that publicity of the decision will promote the relaxation of marijana laws, he added...
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