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Summary: Review of Elizabeth Costello
Review: The eponymous Elizabeth Costello is the center of the universe in this J.M. Coetzee novel, and the author set himself quite a task in attempting to create a novel of such unusual form. Others have tried non conventional forms (McCrae's "Bark of the Dogwood" comes to mind, with its imbedded short stories that turn in on themselves only to become a novel) and while most authors have not been successful at this, both McCrae and Coetzee have. The harder job, it would seem, fell to Coetzee with the fact that the entire book is made up of acceptance speeches and lectures. But don't think that the author cops out in some of the lectures that Elizabeth gives (a la "Da Vinci Code" sequences), for what the main character presents us with is not always coherent and straightforward. Then again, with her fictional "Ulysses-like novel," what else would you expect. All this aside, "Elizabeth Costello" is riveting and highly unusual, and should not be missed. Add this one to your list.
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Summary: The Gate to Costello
Review: The fragmentation of Elizabeth Costello left me with a lingering sense of enigma. Its "lessons" strung like clues along a path; each clue contained in a silence.In reading through the reviews, I was surprised to see no one mention the strange coda: the letters from Lord and Lady Chandos. These letters flummoxed me; I read them in a complete state of puzzlement. Here was a dream-like ending to an already dream-like book. A cursory search on the web returned a short bio of Hugo von Hofmannsthal, the entire text of Hofmannsthal's The Letter of Lord Chandos, and a tangentially pertinent commentary on a lecture by Paul Celan. Shallow scholarship indeed, but this scratching of the surface proved to be the very gate that I, at least, needed to have opened in order to have any purchase on the novel as a whole. After reading Elizabeth Costello, I definitely recommend that one follow up with The Letter of Lord Chandos. The bio of Hofmannsthal mentions that he chose symbolism over realism. And Elizabeth Costello seems to be a symbolic novel shoehorned into the façade of realism. The architecture of the shoehorn is left firmly in place, however, along with, in the first chapter, a self-conscious deconstruction of the artifices required by realism. The author sabotages realism by acknowledging its tricks. The Letter of Lord Chandos seems to provide an itinerary of sorts, almost a map of Elizabeth Costello's travels. In his letter, Lord Chandos is "apologizing for his complete abandonment of literary activity." He is a writer for whom words have become so inexact as to be meaningless: "the language in which I might be able not only to write but to think is neither Latin nor English, neither Italian nor Spanish, but 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." Here is the gate through which Elizabeth Costello cannot pass with any of the words at her disposal. She is the tired old circus performer whose own tricks no longer dazzle her. For her, words now form a barrier to meaning, yet paradoxically, they also conjure up that which they describe and should therefore be left unsaid, the simultaneous futility of the word (as mere signifier) and the potency of the word (as the thing itself). One word, like "obscene," so embodies the meaning that any attempts to unpack that word does nothing but muddy its essence. Its meaning branches out into a tangled conflict of thoughts. She is tripped up in every direction, retreating back to that one word, sounding it again and again in an attempt to fathom it. Its sole embrace on meaning cannot be broken. The paragraph above seems well grounded until I look back at the text - which stubbornly opposes me. My memory of it has lopped off toes and heels in order to cram it into my ill-fitting Cinderella's slipper. Blood wells from the slipper. Start over, start over, it's the slipper that must be redesigned, for the text is obstinate. I must think deeper. And I have the trickiness, the slipperiness of the author with which to deal. He may be presenting lectures that he himself has given, but he is not Elizabeth Costello. Elizabeth Costello believes, in her ignorance of her god, that she has consigned her early sexual incident to the grave, but Coatzee has willed otherwise. He thinks the reader should be exposed to it; her evil has been conjured in this world, completely contrary to Elizabeth Costello's wishes. I came online to post this, only to discover the review by Peter Koonz, a much more thorough thinker than I have been above. I was going to end this review with a request for more thoughts from anyone willing to help me through the tangle, but now I can simply say, thanks Peter.
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Summary: Ageing AlterEgo rants
Review: This book was a gift to me, and I was excited by it. Then I started reading. The first chapter was totally engaging and I expected to really enjoy it. Then the rants started. Others have characterized this as philosophizing, but I don't think it deserves such a complimentary description. The book is not a novel, but a collection of lectures by an ageing woman who has apparently lost her writing touch, is intensely worried about her mortality, and frequently in the company of people who suffer from the same problem, and have "sold out" to the lecture circuit. Sounds like the author to me. When I pick up a novel, I actually would like to experience good character development and at least a little plot. Philosophy and theology are well discussed in many novels. This isn't one of them.
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Summary: One of the world's best philosopher-novelists
Review: This is a novel of ideas, profound ideas, written by someone who is not just a great author but also a great thinker. Coetzee has found a way to wrap a great many conceptual and philosophical arguments into a novel of the sparest proportions in terms of plot, character, and prose. There really is no plot to this book, and only one main character. It is as if Coetzee did not want the traditional elements of the novel to stand in the way of his greater purpose in this work. Amazingly, Elizabeth Costello is still very readable, a testament to the author's skill and grace. This is certainly the most introspective of Coetzee's novels. His main character, Elizabeth Costello, is an aging Australian novelist of international acclaim, and she certainly resembles the author in many ways. Coetzee uses her as a vessel through which he wrestles with some of the more difficult questions out there. Do humans bear a higher responsibility towards the protection and humane treatment of animals? Are there topics so ugly and dark that writers have a moral obligation to stay away from them? What is the nature of salvation? These are the weighty issues that Coetzee takes on here. What is truly impressive is his ability to argue both sides of these questions in a remarkably coherent and convincing fashion. At first one naturally assumes that the opinions expressed by the main character are also those of the author. However, the novel's minor characters, whose primary purpose is to rebut Elizabeth's arguments, are at times more convincing than Elizabeth herself, who often takes extreme positions that are difficult to defend. In this way, the reader is not so much lectured to, which would be tedious, but rather asked to think deeply about these important questions. Coetzee clearly has his statements to make, but he does so with a subtlety that may escape the casual reader. This book, while not as good as his masterful Booker Prize-winner Disgrace, is certainly representative of a Nobel laureate at the top of his intellectual game.
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Summary: Intellectual fun.
Review: This is a sort of picaresque novel of ideas. Elizabeth Costello is an aging novelist who embarks on a series of speaking engagements, each occasioning a different discussion from animal rights to the African novel; and as in a picaresque novel, she attempts to best (intellectual) adversaries. In the last chapter, she is apparently dead, and must answer to a heavenly tribunal. The book is literary and philosophical, not at all the type of book which I would expect to greatly appeal to me. And certainly, I don't think I learned very much. However, the writing is so good that Elizabeth Costello is a delight. And there is even some laugh out loud humor, particularly in the chapter where Elizabeth has a speaking engagement at the college where her son teaches. At the same time, Costello is hardly the most engaging character. The focus of her reflections on life is on whether novel writing is meaningful. It is telling that when she visits with her son, the chapters are told from his viewpoint.
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Summary: A scholar's intellect meets a novelist's imagination
Review: This is an unusual but immensely satisfying book which sees Coetzee combining the two aspects of his literary personality - prize-winning novelist and eminent scholar - in ways that will challenge some readers' preconceptions about the relationship between imaginative and critical writing. Many have ridiculed this book for being ostensibly a pastiche of previously published pieces, torn from their contexts and offered as a unified set of "lessons" which we're supposed to accept as a "novel". The very first lesson, "Realism", with its deliberate foregrounding of the artificiality of fiction, works as an elaborate justification for what follows: "stories" populated with "characters" who sometimes seem scarcely more then puppets through which Coetzee ventriloquises philosophical points. Yet this artificiality, I think, is in itself part of the point of a novel which discusses (among other things) the role of the contemporary writer and his or her work. It deals with a matrix of ethical, cultural and theoretical issues which have been preoccupying literary critics and scholars in recent decades - the morality of creative works and the collision (or blurred intersection) of religion and humanism as they grapple with evil, eros, death and what it means to be human. Ironically or not, Coetzee's "stories" - especially "The Humanities in Africa" - benefit immensely from the opening expose of realism: it reminds you that authorial choices are constantly being made, and allows you to appreciate the ones Coetzee ultimately makes. It's almost as if he has stripped off the surface layer of a realist novel and shown us what is really going on underneath. I enjoyed that and, in some ways, found it more honest than a wholly, unselfconsciously realist account of the same experiences would have been. Is Elizabeth Costello simply Coetzee, transposed from one Antipodean home to another? Of course she is - but only to the extent that most of her intellectual combatants are other facets of Coetzee, too; which is to say they represent other positions which any intelligent, thoughtful human in an outpost of Europe could just as happily occupy. But Coetzee is there, physically, too, I think. Who else could that tall, dark and bearded man who keeps popping up now and again possibly be?
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Summary: Beautiful and Profound whatever it means...
Review: This is the first book of J.M. Coetzee I've read, after having Disgrace call to me and intriguing me for years but never responding. It covers in a somewhat disjointed way the life of the aging Elizabeth Costello, Australian author and principled individualist. While I can't say I know exactly what this story is about (it has various enjoyable challenging intellectual/philosophical discussions, but only hints of a whole view of the detached life of a writer), I found myself delighted by the writing, thinking over and over again ah, so this is what quality of writing wins the Nobel Prize. Coetzee does write extremely beautifully even when the subject is tough (and perhaps dry, like a bit of old jerky). The ending passage, novelly written and leaving me wondering if Coetzee was even the writer, is some of the most intense and real and profound writing I have ever seen....Now I'm going to go back and read In The Heart Of The Country, and eventually I'll get to Disgrace, and perhaps come to understand this book better along the way.
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Summary: A series of linked "Lessons"
Review: With "Elizabeth Costello," J.M. Coetzee has written a collection of linked, stylistically varied stories about a world famous author, Elizabeth Costello, not unlike Coetzee himself, the two time Booker Prize winning novelist and recent winner of the Nobel prize for literature. Elizabeth Costello is a writer with early fame from a novel based on James Joyce's Molly Bloom. She has a small critical society based on her years of work. She is, variously, traveling to receive an award or invited to the corners of the globe to lecture on its evils. She is world weary. The chapters are conceived as "Lessons." The stories tend toward the pedagogic, elucidating and educating the outside world of Elizabeth Costello's personal struggle. Death, aging, human evil, the rights of animals-these are several of the themes that tie the Lessons of Elizabeth Costello together. Coetzee, soberingly wedded to his polemics, may disconcert the casual reader. Countries that are in strife beget political novels: the compulsion to write lends itself to the political act. Outsiders define themselves within the context of their alien surroundings. In this country, fiction rarely finds a focus on political strife. We are closed off, typically, from anything more than local politics. We are on the world's stage, but we are relatively distanced from it, as citizens. We are stable. Our nearest literary coevals would be Great Britain, although even Britain has some internal political strife. This position has always driven Coetzee's somber detailing of his South African conflicts, and, as he has taken a step away to Australia to teach, he furthers this distance in his character by making her a woman. Coetzee's writing often recalls the defiance of Beckett and the tone of Kafka, and barely conceals an irony that skitters on the edge of the perfunctory. Through EC's gloomy self-deprecation, we read desperation. The 'gaps' Coetzee calls out, meant to move forward to the important part of the narrative, become elements of the meta-fictional, as if to say the literature is not the point. Read the full review at: http://theliterary.blogspot.com
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