Characters
- Paul Rayment, a French expatriate in his sixties now living in Adelaide, who at the beginning of the novel has his right leg above the knee amputated after a bicycle accident. He is a photographer by profession who has no children of his own and no ties to his homeland or his adopted country, except a collection of 19th-century Australian photographs.
- Elizabeth Costello, an aging Australian writer famous for her early novel The House on Eccles Street, which re-tells James Joyce's Ulysses from the perspective of the protagonist's wife, Molly Bloom. She appears on Paul's doorstop about one-third into the novel and begins interfering with his life by setting him up on a 'blind' date with a woman he glimpsed at the hospital and pushing him to declare his feelings for his carer. It is also heavily implied throughout the novel that he is a character in a book she is writing. Costello is the eponymous protagonist of Coetzee's previous novel.
- Marijana Jokic, a paid nurse who cares for Paul at his home and becomes the object of his affections and desires. Her family are refugees from Croatia.
- Drago Jokic, Marijana's sixteen-year-old son, whom Paul looks upon as the son he never had.
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Famous quotes containing the word characters:
“His leanings were strictly lyrical, descriptions of nature and emotions came to him with surprising facility, but on the other hand he had a lot of trouble with routine items, such as, for instance, the opening and closing of doors, or shaking hands when there were numerous characters in a room, and one person or two persons saluted many people.”
—Vladimir Nabokov (1899–1977)
“There are characters which are continually creating collisions and nodes for themselves in dramas which nobody is prepared to act with them. Their susceptibilities will clash against objects that remain innocently quiet.”
—George Eliot [Mary Ann (or Marian)
“There are as many characters in men
As there are shapes in nature.”
—Ovid (Publius Ovidius Naso)