From Publishers Weekly
Even more uncompromising than usual, this latest novel by Coetzee (his first since 1999's Booker Prize-winning Disgrace) blurs the bounds of fiction and nonfiction while furthering the author's exploration of urgent moral and aesthetic questions. Elizabeth Costello, a fictional aging Australian novelist who gained fame for a Ulysses-inspired novel in the 1960s, reveals the workings of her still-formidable mind in a series of formal addresses she either attends or delivers herself (an award acceptance speech, a lecture on a cruise ship, a graduation speech). This ingenious structure allows Coetzee to circle around his protagonist, revealing her preoccupations and contradictions her relationships with her son, John, an academic, and her sister, Blanche, a missionary in Africa; her deep, almost fanatical concern with animal rights; her conflicted views on reason and realism; her grapplings with the human problems of sex and spirituality. The specters of the Holocaust and colonialism, of Greek mythology and Christian morality, and of Franz Kafka and the absurd haunt the novel, as Coetzee deftly weaves the intense contemplation of abstractions with the everyday life of an all-too-human body and mind. The struggle for self-expression comes to a wrenching climax when Elizabeth faces a final reckoning and finds herself at a loss for words. This is a novel of weighty ideas, concerned with what it means to be human and with the difficult and seductive task of making meaning. It is a resounding achievement by Coetzee and one that will linger with the reader long after its reverberating conclusion.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.
--This text refers to the
Hardcover
edition.
From Booklist
Although it's billed as "a novel masquerading as a biography," some readers may speculate that Coetzee's newest is a biography posing as a novel, or even lectures formed into fiction (six portions were previously published separately). The format is instantly intriguing. Elizabeth Costello is a near-elderly Australian novelist who remains best known for an early work in which she appropriates James Joyce's
Ulysses character, Molly Bloom. Coetzee tackles problems of writing, literature, philosophy, and family through eight "lessons," most of which center on a lengthy formal address. In "Realism," Costello travels to Pennsylvania with her son to receive an award; Coetzee slyly enumerates conventions of realistic storytelling even as he guides Costello through interview, debate, and a lecture in which she declares, "The word-mirror is broken, irreparably." In "The Novel in Africa," Costello lectures on a cruise ship with an old acquaintance, Emmanuel Egudu, a Nigerian expatriate novelist. Egudu's talk takes center stage, even as Costello demands to know why there is "no African novel worth speaking of." In later "lessons," Costello speaks passionately about animal rights; hears her sister, a nun, deride the humanities; and gives a speech she is not sure she believes, claiming writers who explore evil may not survive uncontaminated. Coetzee may be exploding the genre, but
Elizabeth Costello has real novelistic force. Our pleasure is watching this fascinating woman wrestle with intellectual issues as if they are life-and-death matters--and being convinced, in the end, that they are.
Keir GraffCopyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
--This text refers to the
Hardcover
edition.
by Michael Redhill
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