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:
“The Nature of Familiar Letters, written, as it were, to the Moment, while the Heart is agitated by Hopes and Fears, on Events undecided, must plead an Excuse for the Bulk of a Collection of this Kind. Mere Facts and Characters might be comprised in a much smaller Compass: But, would they be equally interesting?”
—Samuel Richardson (1689–1761)
“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)
“Though they be mad and dead as nails,
Heads of the characters hammer through daisies;
Break in the sun till the sun breaks down,
And death shall have no dominion.”
—Dylan Thomas (1914–1953)