First impressions on Short Story: Lies by J.M. Coetzee

 When your parents get older, you get angry with them. You get frustrated when they don’t listen to you. Or worse, when they listen to you and prove that your judgment was flawed. There is a vulnerability you start exhibiting – with the stain and stench of tomatoes slowly going rotten. And that’s you – not even the parent who is ageing.

A man goes to stay with his mother because she has had a heart-related mishap. The goal is that, at the end of the visit, she would agree to move into a home closer to his sister’s house, where she would be better cared for. But the conversation did not go as planned, and the man is frustrated. He is unwilling to admit that this may be the last time he visits his mother. He cannot bear to explore the possibility that she may be going senile and imagining some gardener who doesn’t exist. He is upset with how selfish and helpless he finds himself. And he ultimately asks his wife to keep him true and honest about his own mortality as time passes.

As a letter, it is quite long. As an indictment of human frailties, it is succinct. And when you finish reading the piece and step back a minute, you notice that it actually was far more intricate than you imagined it to be. It’s like admiring miniature furniture. 

It may be small, but it is the absolute, most complete component of its world. And that is Coetzee’s literary style – exacting, sparse, and maybe that’s why, true.