Slow Man

Just read "Slow Man" by J.M. Coetzee and I'm still digesting it, but here are a few thoughts:
In both this book and "Disgrace" (which I also read recently) Coetzee's them is love. How we get it, how we lose it, how we spend much of our time being molded by our desire for it, our meager attempts at learning how to give it and how we are never quite able to feel satisfied by it. In "Slow Man" the surface story is of an aging photographer who loses his leg in a bicycle accident and has to learn to deal with his own depression, hopelessness and feelings of love for his nurse. A character enters midway through the book who seems to be either a stand-in for the author or ourselves as readers - a character who knows everything we know about the man (Paul Rayment), as if she was reading a book about him. This character is treated abysmally by Paul: left out in the cold, ignored, scorned. She places herself in the most vulnerable position, and is judged as being too old, too ugly, too grating for him to ever love. And so it ends. No resolution. No love.

Whew. It's a tough one, emotionally. "Disgrace" was equally hard-core. What I like about his writing is the honesty of it. The bare-bones, heart-wrenching emotional truth. What I find hard to take is the total and complete lack of any hope. Perhaps other readers have found it there? Somewhere?