Customer Reviews

Elizabeth Costello

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4 star:		(1)
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1 star:		(1)

 

 

In Elizabeth Costello, we find Coetzee confronting some of the fundamental structures of the society we have known for so long, forcing the reader to think and have an insight into life. This thought-provoking novel which is actually a collection of essays with some having been published before as lectures, is a deep but entertaining book. Coetzee uses Costello Elizabeth as a fictional character to put forward these essays and uses other characters as critics to create a dialectical outlook for the book. It is this approach that I think made this book so unique. A reader is forced to think beyond his beliefs. And in so doing, the reader is forced to evolve. I recommend this book along with The Usurper and Other Stories, Nervous Conditions to any curious mind.

Coetzee's novel illustrates that literature, like history, is based on perception as events and ideas are interpreted differently from generation to generation. Elizabeth Costello nears the climax of her professional life and wonders if she will remain relevant in future generations. The novel explores how having different perceptions of literature and history allows ideas to live on rather than lose significance. An individual's life is much more fragile as it involves the struggle to look beyond the mundane to find meaning, which implies that things are never stable as other people will inherit perceptions only to change them.

The fact that some of the sections of this novel have been published as lectures takes nothing away from the grand ideas of this book. Though not easy entertainment, yes, one must think a little when reading, this book is still very very entertaining. A writer must evolve, change, do what he or she wishes to do which is exactly what it seems Coetzee has done with Elizabeth Costello.

J.M. Coetzee is one of the best writers that I have ever read. His winning of the Nobel Prize was fully justified. However if this disaster of a "novel" had been released a couple of years ago, it's doubtful that the Nobel jury would have awarded him anything.

For this isn't really a novel, it's a repackaging of a Coetzee's lectures from over the years. He's constructed a completely unconvincing framework to present these lectures with the result being a horribly boring and absolutely crushing experience.

How could such a great writer release such a sorry book? It is almost as if he decided to conduct a writing exercise rather than a novel.

Read "Disgrace", "Youth" or "Waiting For The Barbarians". Do not waste your time on this nonsense.