New books by, articles about or Sasquatch-like sightings of J.M. Coetzee routinely send me back to that infamous YouTube clip of Geoff Dyer face-planting while being introduced by Coetzee at the Adelaide Book Festival – an episode often cited as evidence that the Nobel Laureate has no sense of humour. The garlanded ex-South African’s work is famously as dry as the Karoo, and Coetzee himself has been accused of having only ever laughed once. But a smile is visible in ‘The Pole’, the longest story in this collection.

Beatriz, in her late forties, is an educated Spanish woman, ‘a good person’ in a ‘civilised’ (read dormant) marriage, involved in organising things like highbrow concerts but otherwise not taken seriously. Unexceptional, she calls herself ‘not sexy, and certainly not seductive’. She finds herself in charge of hosting a visiting pianist, aged 72, a white-haired Pole called Witold Walczykiewicz with ‘lugubrious’ face and ‘faded’ eyes, who has a love-hate relationship with his homeland and a surname that is often mispronounced. (He also displays ‘the ghost of a smile’.)

Witold has made a substantial career out of ‘historically authentic Chopin’, but his playing is deemed by many to be ‘over-intellectualised’ and ‘unusually dry’. He declines to ‘justify his art’, quibbles about whether one can even call him a pianist, and says his craft is more important than his being happy. But he falls immediately (if chivalrously) in love with Beatriz, concocts further trips to Spain to see her, sends florid letters and tries to whisk her off to Brazil. ‘Of course it is about sex,’ says her husband, efficiently. The bemused Beatriz, though, considers Witold a fool and, with a rather stiff, womanly propriety, invests a lot of time and energy in setting him straight.

In Coetzee’s deliberate, somewhat old-fashioned prose, the two manoeuvre around each other fitfully, like bad chess players, interrogating every thought and gesture, until they do finally form some kind of relationship, albeit one in which they can’t communicate in their native tongues, whence miscommunications of every sort, linguistic, musical, technological and physical, ensue, leading to more irresolution.

Meanwhile, the author is having plenty of fun, peppering the story with knowing jokes about aridity and austerity; about translation; about opacity, and detail, and editing; about trying to understand the artist from the art; about being a character in the art; about ‘lofty thoughts’ and being famous, and ‘abandoned work’ that might be fiction and might not. There are jokes about not getting jokes, and even jokes about Franz Kafka’s jokes. Anyway, eventually Witold and Beatriz sleep together (the word ‘pity’ is used several times). I shall not elaborate on what comes after that except to say that the story is, thankfully, greater than the sum of its apparently unpromising parts.

Resolution of the utmost sort, though, lurks in the other stories, most of which are dusted-off chapters from the life of Coetzee’s 2003 heroine/female alter ego, Elizabeth Costello. Intense, vegetarian and prone to viewing every normal human tendency from the presbyter’s pulpit, the famous novelist ‘Mrs Costello’ is getting on a bit. Otherwise we’re still in familiar territory: human exceptionalism vs animal rights, the horrors of the Bush administration, matters of God (denied) and souls (debated over), all populated by characters who speak as if they’re in an ethics seminar.

Coetzee is 83, and if there is a unifying theme here it’s the friction-rich proceedings between elderly parents and their adult offspring. Costello’s son goes to see her about end-of-life plans and they spend the whole time arguing about whether cats have faces. ‘Where does it get you?’ he asks, frustratedly. Coetzee does not console himself, or us, with answers.

One night, Elizabeth clears out her writing desk. And there it is, I feel. The Pole and Other Stories has the strong whiff of goodbyes. ‘The cogs are seizing up, the lights are going out.’ It’s ‘nature’s way of telling me to come home’.