M&D: Vaucanson? Is That You, Again?

[Monte Davis]

I'm in the middle of J.M. Coetzee's _Slow Man_ (2005), about an amputee
living in Australia and the Croatian woman who takes care of him. With vague
memories of reviews when it came out, I was ready when "Elizabeth Costello"
- protagonist and eponym of Coetzee's previous novel - invites herself in
for a visit. But I wasn't prepared for her to say of the caretaker:

 

" Marijana. is an educated woman. Hasn't she told you? She spent two years
at the Art Institute in Dubrovnik and came away with a diploma in
restoration. Her husband worked at the Institute too. That was where they
met. He was a technician, specializing in antique technology. He
reassembled, for instance, a mechanical duck that had lain in parts in the
basement of the Institute for two hundred years, rusting. Now it quacks like
a regular duck, it waddles, it lays eggs. It is one of the _pieces de
resistance_ of their collection.' "

 

OK, now I'm thinking that Coetzee himself moved to Australia just before
those novels, and formerly Australian Peter Carey namechecked the duck last
year in _The Chemistry of Tears_. The plot thickens like a good terrine de
foie gras de canard.

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