Rating: 
Summary: Thinking with her heart
Review: Directly upon finishing Elizabeth Costello, I was ready to concede that I didn't know what the heck I had just read. The book had a tangible emotional impact on me, but I was at a loss to explain what Coetzee was after, what his meaning was. I was at the point of assigning this to the pile of the unfathomable, but there was one thing I wished to pursue first. This pursuit, which cost me a mere couple of hours, retrieved the book for me and provided a structure and meaning that I had initially missed. (More below.)Most of the chapters (or lessons, as outlined in the table of contents) in Elizabeth Costello have been published elsewhere between 1997 and 2002. As a whole they present a series of lectures that fictional fiction writer Elizabeth Costello attends or delivers. These lectures are tied together minimally with some descriptions of her family and some dialog between characters. The final lesson, "At the Gate", is a dream-like sequence in which Costello is somehow being judged and is required to explain her beliefs. The book ends with an excerpt form Hugo von Hofmannsthal's short work Letter of Lord Chandos to Lord Bacon (1902). A postscript follows, which is Coetzee's addition to Hofmannsthahal's work: a supplementary letter from Lord Chandos' wife Elizabeth (Elizabeth C.!) to Bacon. The first seven lessons had some sort of unity. They were, after all, lectures that somehow included Elizabeth Costello. Okay. But with the addition of the ethereal lesson "At the Gate" and the timetwisting inclusion of Hofmannsthal, Chandos, and his wife, I knew that Coetzee was after something much more complex. The bit of homework I did before giving up on the book was to retrieve Hofmannstahl's work (available easily enough on the web). This "letter," which is about six pages long was eye-opening. Here was the theme of Elizabeth Costello spelled out. Here is a writer apologizing for his "complete abandonment of literary activity," despondent and feeble, capable of being driven to despair by the thought of rats being poisoned or the death of an eel. In the letter (and in Coetzee's excerpt), Chandos talks of how things - tangible things - are all that can provide meaning and, to his wife, "rapture." Chandos and Elizabeth Costello (in lesson 8) both talk about "thinking with the heart." Chandos says "To me, then, it is as though my body consists of nought but ciphers which give me the key to everything; or as if we could enter into a new and hopeful relationship with the whole structure of existence if only we begin to think with the heart." (An aside: having recently read A.S. Byatt's The Biographer's Tale, I am struck by the similar theme of writers losing the ability to be sustained by words and images, needing instead things.) What finally tied lesson 8 to the rest of the work for me, and created a "Eureka!" moment, was a line near the end of Chandos letter, when talking of the inadequacy of Latin, English, Spanish and Italian to write or think, he speaks of a "language none of whose words is known to me, a language in which inanimate things speak to me and wherein I may ONE DAY HAVE TO JUSTIFY MYSELF BEFORE AN UNKNOWN JUDGE." [emphasis added] Having read Hofmannsthal's work, I now had a resource for interpreting Costello better than I had initially. I am always happy to find literature that delivers some depth of understanding, and invariably these works require some work on my part. There is a direct correspondence between what I am willing to do and what the work is willing to give up. Elizabeth Costello is one of those works. As far as I am concerned, I have much work to still do.
Rating: 
Summary: A difficult woman to get to know, and to befriend
Review: ELIZABETH COSTELLO by J.M. Coeztee is a different work of fiction. In fact, I've never read anything like it before. The book, about a novelist from Australia, is written in sections of talks that Elizabeth gives or attends. (Two of the sections were in the book THE LIVES OF ANIMALS, which reports two talks Costello gives at a mythical North American college.) The talks focus on different issues, all swirling somehow around the role of a writer and what a writer should fulfill for society. The final "lesson" seems to be about Costello making her case for her own afterlife, as she is asked to write her statement and testify before judges in an ambiguously drawn final scenario. Also, in an unprecedented move, Coetzee has Costello write a talk against an actual, living writer, and she ends up giving it to an audience that includes him. One must ask, "Is Coetzee taking this man on? Is there something that has passed between them that the reader isn't privy to? Why wouldn't he fictionalize someone, rather than using a known, living author?" The work is pretty philosophical, I found, and I would warn anyone who wanted to read Coetzee for the first time in the wake of his Nobel Prize win for literature in 2003 to choose something else to start with, perhaps DISGRACE or AGE OF IRON. The heroine is somewhat unlikeable, and, yet, one feels sympathetic to her attachments and concerns. This definitely "feels like" Coetzee, somewhat removed, deeply idea-driven, with a main character one somewhat fears, yet roots for. Overall the book is a serious work, worth time and the considerable effort I think it takes to understand, and yet it is not enjoyable per se.
Rating: 
Summary: One of Coetzee's best
Review: Elizabeth Costello is a 66 year old Australian author who has written 9 novels as well as poetry, a book on bird life and journal articles. She is the recipient of several literary awards and on each occasion she is invited to give a lecture in which she expresses not only her ideas in her books but her view of religion, the lives of animals, the mission of a novel writer or various aesthetic issues.
Thus the reader is confronted in Mr Coetzee's novel with a wide range of essential thoughts: how to define the function of the novel in our lives, the specificity of native African literature, "The humanities teach us humanity", the way people treat animals compared to the way the Nazis treated the Jews - a questionable comparison? - or the fact that fiction takes us out of ourselves into other lives. Elizabeth Costello also discusses poets like Rilke or Ted Hughes or the relevance of imposing Christian faith in many African countries. How should the writers deal with the question of evil and Eros in their writings? Does a writer need to have beliefs, is he allowed to change his beliefs?
It is not easy to say how much Mr Coetzee wishes to tell about himself through the main character of his novel. In any case, Elizabeth Costello is a better writer than lecturer/talker: "Her strategy with interviews is to take control of the exchange" by using blocks of dialogue rehearsed in advance. "Even as a reader of her own stories she lacks animation". "Not her métier, argumentation. She shouldn't be there". Henceforth, her lectures often lack a structure and the audience are puzzled by her changes of topic - or sometimes lack of topic - due to the fact that she is "full of doubt, and desperate too". She feels that it is not her duty to teach or preach anything through her books but merely to show how people lived in a certain place and time.
An accomplished work which deals with a wide range of philosophical, ethic, religious and moral issues that are so essential in our lives.
Rating:
Summary: Portrait of the Famous Artist
Review: Elizabeth Costello is a famous Australian writer who spends much of her later years travelling the world and giving lectures. Like many famous people Costello has an uncomfortable relationship with her fame. At times she simply goes through the motions, remaining disconnected from her speeches and satisfying many of her listeners. However, on many occasions sited throughout this novel she spontaneously decides to speak about something she actually believes in. The results are usually unpopular thoughts that her audience has no interest in. Costello is trying to sort through her past while coming to conclusions about the meaning of life. Her strained relationships with her children and sister leave her a highly isolated individual grappling with her battered psyche. Despite the unpopularity of her recent ideas, her fame rests securely in a novel she wrote many years ago that expands on the fictional life of James Joyce's Molly Bloom. Coetzee has done something both astonishing and baffling with this novel. At the back of the book he lists his acknowledgements. The truth is that substantial amounts of this novel are lectures that Coetzee himself has previously given and/or published before. As the novel progresses these lectures are integrated less into the story until the final short section which seems to hang very precariously upon the end of the novel and bears no obvious relation to the story. Rather than give us just a straightforward critique of literary fame integrated into his story, Coetzee also mocks how novels are traditionally constructed by writing what amounts to very little story to link these disconnected works. This isn't to say that it makes a bad novel. On the contrary, the story is very effective. I only longed to hear more about Elizabeth. The lectures are incredibly interesting. They focus on a range of subjects from the rights of animals to the meaning of representing evil in literature. We are given the voice of the artist who is uncertain about his creations and wary of the fame they have brought him, something that the majority of readers don't normally want to hear. Coetzee is able to make this compelling with his masterful use of language and complex ideas. No doubt Coetzee's uncomfortable relationship to his literary fame has only been strained further having recently won the Nobel Prize. I wonder if he had been writing this novel a little later whether he would have also included the speech he delivered at that ceremony. While this is a fascinating work, I would suggest that if you are approaching Coetzee's work for the first time this strange, short and brilliant novel isn't the best thing to begin with. You might want to start reading some of his earlier and more straightforward novels like the brilliant Disgrace or Age of Iron.
Rating:
Summary: A Very Different Novel by a Great Writer
Review: Elizabeth Costello is an Australian novelist in eclipse. The reader becomes acquainted with her through a series of lectures. Although she had published critically successful novels a long time ago, she is now reduced to the lecture circuit. Ms. Costello is often bored with the endless dinners and interviews at colleges and television stations; but she has no trouble, however, taking the money for her trouble. She at one point describes a young college instructor, who picks her up at the airport before a lecture, and people like her, rather cruelly, I thought: "His mother has a word for people like this. She calls them the goldfish. One thinks they are small and harmless, she says, because each wants no more than the tiniest nibble of flesh, the merest hemidemimiligram." She goes on to say that she no longer answers fan letters from these "goldfish" because they sell her letters on the autograph market. Many of us have witnessed similar condesending attitudes from "visiting" writers who cannot wait to get out of an auditorium and God help you if you ask them for their autograph. Ms. Costello gets into trouble because of one lecture when she equates the Holocaust with the modern day slaughter of "innocent" animals. "She had spoken on that occasion on what she saw and still sees as the enslavement of whole animal populations. A slave: a being whose life and death are in the hands of another. What else are cattle, sheep, poultry? The death camps would not have been dreamed up without the example of the meat-processing plants before them." I doubt that many Holocaust survivors would agree with this analogy. An extremely complex character, Ms. Costello has qualities that are endearing. She makes a most unselfish offer to a dying man for example. Her account of her first encounter with pure evil is moving as well. A humanist, she also discusses with her rigid Catholic sister-- who is a Sister-- why she believes a living Christ makes much more sense than a dying one. She does not have a systematic philosophy. She doesn't have to; she is a mere teller of tales. The final chapter, "At The Gate", is in the tradition of and as good as anything Kafka wrote. ELIABETH COSTELLO is a strange though beautifully written novel and very different from what Mr. Coetzee usually writes-- or at least those novels of his I have read-- but I found it altogether intriguing. Mr. Coetzee's view of the universe is dark; but, after all, we do live in a world that has produced its share of Hitlers and Stalins and Saddam Husseins.
Rating:
Summary: Rather disappointing
Review: Elizabeth Costello is an elderly Australian writer who travels all over the world to give and listen to presentations on a variety of subjects ranging from the role of African writing in society to the killing of animals in slaughterhouses. In essence, Elizabeth Costello is an alibi for Coetzee to put together a series of essays with his views on a number of subjects. Even though this may be interesting in itself, I did not like the fact that the book is now in between genres: one the one hand it pretends to be a novel with a fictitious main character, on the other hand it is a bundle of essays. This makes the character development of Elizabeth Costello rather weak, weaker than one may expect from a Nobel Laureate.
Rating:
Summary: Thought-provoking Essays Disguised as a Novel
Review: Elizabeth Costello isn't really a novel. It is a thought-provoking collection of essays disguised as a novel. In that same way, this novel isn't really 'about' a fictional character named Elizabeth Costello, it's about J.M. Coetzee himself. Coetzee uses the fictional construct of the Costello character to convey these essays--and in some instances uses other characters to criticize these essays. It's a very interesting approach and it works--which I think says a lot for Coetzee's talents. My favorite chapter is the last one, where Costello thinks she has died, and death becomes almost Kafkaesque. Costello is annoyed. She dislikes Kafka--her experiences in this 'afterlife' are at once brilliant and very funny. If you are in the mood for an intellectual challenge, and don't feel the need for a plot, Elizabeth Costello will suit your needs.
Rating: 
Summary: Disappointing
Review: Encouraged by the joy I had from "Disgrace", I jumped at this new Coetzee book. Unfortunately, I find it extremely tiring to read and for half of the time, I had difficulty following the arguments which incidentally are not very universal. There are only a couple of chapters which I find slightly more interesting. Perhaps, this is due to my not being very much in-tune with philosphical writings. I think I will be better off sticking with memoirs and fiction and not try to read a half-fiction, half-biographical work.
Rating:
Summary: My Wife Loved It, I Liked It
Review: For a book to be great in the broad spectrum it can't appeal to just men, just women, just Republicans, just Catholics, or just any group. My wife and I often disagree on what books we like. What I think is great, she often calls "stupid." That doesn't make the books I like any less great to me, they are just not broad spectrum great. When a book does cross all lines is when it can fall into that broad spectrum greatness (for my wife and I, this is in books like SECRET LIFE OF BEES, THE DA VINCI CODE, and MY FRACTURE LIFE). My wife liked ELIZABETH COSTELLO far more than I did. She called it "great" and doesn't understand how I don't agree (although me being stupid has been an often suggestion). I read it. I didn't hate it. I just didn't feel my life was any better or worse for having read it. I wasn't moved. I was only passively entertained. I don't argue that it is a "great" book. Certainly for people such as my wife it is a "great" book. However, it is not broad spectrum great; i.e. universally great only in that one of us loved it and one liked it.
Rating:
Summary: Interesting (at times) but not fun to read
Review: I am one of those who read Disgrace and went out to buy this book (without even bothering to read any of the reviews). Other reviews will give you a sense of the structure so I'll spare you the description of the book. While most (though by no means all) of the chapters/lectures were interesting and provoked thinking, I felt most went on for very long with unnecessarily academic (and often times bordering on the pretentious) language. This felt like a bunch of essays put together around a fictional character to make it a "novel" and it shows.
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