Elizabeth Costello

by J. M. Coetzee

Overview

J.M. Coetzee's latest novel, The Schooldays of Jesus, is now available from Viking. Late Essays: 2006-2016 will be available January 2018. 

Since 1982, J. M. Coetzee has been dazzling the literary world. After eight novels that have won, among other awards, two Booker Prizes, and most recently, the Nobel Prize, Coetzee has once again crafted an unusual and deeply affecting tale. Told through an ingenious series of formal addresses, Elizabeth Costello is, on the surface, the story of a woman's life as mother, sister, lover, and writer. Yet it is also a profound and haunting meditation on the nature of storytelling.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780142004814
Publisher:	Penguin Publishing Group
Publication date:	10/26/2004
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	240
Sales rank:	291,900
Product dimensions:	5.10(w) x 7.70(h) x 0.60(d)
Age Range:	18 - 17 Years

About the Author

Born in Cape Town, South Africa, on February 9, 1940, John Michael Coetzee studied first at Cape Town and later at the University of Texas at Austin, where he earned a Ph.D. degree in literature. In 1972 he returned to South Africa and joined the faculty of the University of Cape Town. His works of fiction include Dusklands, Waiting for the Barbarians, which won South Africa’s highest literary honor, the Central News Agency Literary Award, and the Life and Times of Michael K., for which Coetzee was awarded his first Booker Prize in 1983. He has also published a memoir, Boyhood: Scenes From a Provincial Life, and several essays collections. He has won many other literary prizes including the Lannan Award for Fiction, the Jerusalem Prize and The Irish Times International Fiction Prize. In 1999 he again won Britain’s prestigious Booker Prize for Disgrace, becoming the first author to win the award twice in its 31-year history. In 2003, Coetzee was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature.

Hometown:

Adelaide, Australia

Date of Birth:

February 9, 1940

Place of Birth:

Cape Town, South Africa

Education:

B.A., University of Cape Town, 1960; M.A., 1963; Ph.D. in Literature, University of Texas, Austin, 1969

Read an Excerpt

THERE IS FIRST of all the problem of the opening, namely, how to get us from where we are, which is, as yet, nowhere, to the far bank. It is a simple bridging problem, a problem of knocking together a bridge.People solve such problems every day. They solve them, and having solved them push on.

Let us assume that, however it may have been done, it is done. Let us take it that the bridge is built andcrossed, that we can put it out of our mind. We have left behind the territory in which we were. We are in the far territory; where we want to be.

Elizabeth Costello is a writer, born in 1928, which makes her sixty-six years old, going on sixty-seven. Shehas written nine novels, two books of poems, a book on bird life, and a body of journalism. By birth she isAustralian. She was born in Melbourne and still lives there, though she spent the years 1951 to 1963abroad, in England and France. She has been married twice. She has two children, one by each marriage.

Elizabeth Costello made her name with her fourth novel, The House on Eccles Street (1969), whose main character is Marion Bloom, wife of Leopold Bloom, principal character of another novel, Ulysses (1922),by James Joyce. In the past decade there has grown up around her a small critical industry; there is even anElizabeth Costello Society, based in Albuquerque, New Mexico, which puts out a quarterly ElizabethCostello Newsletter.

In the spring of 1995 Elizabeth Costello traveled, or travels (present tense henceforth), to Williamstown,Pennsylvania, to Altona College, to receive the Stowe Award. The award is made biennially to a majorworld writer, selected by a jury of critics and writers. It consists of a purse of $5o,ooo, funded by a bequestfrom the Stowe estate, and a gold medal. It is one of the larger literary prizes in the United States.

On her visit to Pennsylvania Elizabeth Costello (Costello is her maiden name) is accompanied by her sonJohn. John has a job teaching physics and astronomy at a college in Massachusetts, but for reasons of hisown is on leave for the year. Elizabeth has become a little frail: without the help of her son she would notbe under taking this taxing trip across half the world.

We skip. They have reached Williamstown and have been conveyed to their hotel, a surprisingly largebuilding for a small city, a tall hexagon, all dark marble outside and crystal and mirrors inside. In her rooma dialogue takes place.

'Will you be comfortable?' asks the son.

'I am sure I will she replies. The room is on the twelfth floor, with a prospect over a golf course and,beyond that, over wooded hills.

'Then why not have a rest? They are fetching us at six thirty I'll give you a call a few minutes beforehand.'

He is about to leave. She speaks.

'John, what exactly do they want from me?'

'Tonight? Nothing. It's just a dinner with members of the jury. We won't let it turn into a long evening. I'llremind them you are tired.'

'And tomorrow?'

'Tomorrow is a different story. You'll have to gird your loins for tomorrow, I am afraid.'

'I have forgotten why I agreed to come. It seems a great ordeal to put oneself through, for no good reason. Ishould have asked them to forget the ceremony and send the checque in the mail.'

After the long flight, she is looking her age. She has never taken care of her appearance; she used to be ableto get away with it; now it shows. Old and tired.'It doesn't work that way, I am afraid, Mother. If you accept the money, you must go through with theshow.'

She shakes her head. She is still wearing the old blue raincoat she wore from the airport. Her hair has agreasy, lifeless look. She has made no move to unpack. If he leaves her now, what will she do? Lie down inher raincoat and shoes?

He is here, with her, out of love. He cannot imagine her getting through this trial without him at her side.He stands by her because he is her son, her loving son. But he is also on the point of becoming - distastefulword - her trainer.

He thinks of her as a seal, an old, tired circus seal. One more time she must heave herself up on to the tub,one more time show that she can balance the ball on her nose. Up to him to coax her, put heart in her, gether through the performance.

'It is the only way they have,' he says as gently as he can. 'They admire you, they want to honour you. It isthe best way they can think of doing that. Giving you money. Broadcasting your name. Using the one to dothe other.'

Standing over the Empire-style writing table, shuffling through the pamphlets that tell her where to shop,where to dine, how to use the telephone, she casts him one of the quick, ironic looks that still have thepower to surprise him, to remind him of who she is. 'The best way?' she murmurs.

At six thirty he knocks. She is ready, waiting, full of doubts but prepared to face the foe. She wears her bluecostume and silk jacket, her lady novelist's uniform, and the white shoes with which there is nothing wrongyet which somehow make her look like Daisy Duck. She has washed her hair and brushed it back. It stilllooks greasy, but honourably greasy, like a navvy's or a mechanic's. Already on her face the passive lookthat, if you saw it in a young girl, you would call withdrawn. A face without personality, the kind thatphotographers have to work on to lend distinction. Like Keats, he thinks, the great advocate of blankreceptiveness.

The blue costume, the greasy hair, are details, signs of a moderate realism. Supply the particulars, allow thesignifications to emerge of themselves. A procedure pioneered by Daniel Defoe. Robinson Crusoe, cast upon the beach, looks around for his shipmates. But there are none. 'I never saw them afterwards, or any signof them says he, 'except three of their hats, one cap, and two shoes that were not fellows.' Two shoes, notfellows: by not being fellows, the shoes have ceased to be footwear and become proofs of death, torn by thefoaming seas off the feet of drowning men and tossed ashore. No large words, no despair, just hats and capsand shoes.

For as far back as he can remember, his mother has secluded herself in the mornings to do her writing. Nointrusions under any circumstances. He used to think of himself as a misfortunate child, lonely andunloved. When they felt particularly sorry for themselves, he and his sister used to slump outside the lockeddoor and make tiny whining sounds. In time the whining would change to humming or singing, and theywould feel better, forgetting their forsakenness.

Now the scene has changed. He has grown up. He is no longer outside the door but inside, observing her asshe sits, back to the window, confronting, day after day, year after year, while her hair slowly goes fromblack to grey, the blank page. What doggedness, he thinks! She deserves the medal, no doubt about that,this medal and many more. For valour beyond the call of duty.

The change came when he was thirty-three. Until then he had not read a word she had written. That was hisreply to her, his revenge on her for locking him out. She denied him, therefore he denied her. Or perhaps herefused to read her in order to protect himself. Perhaps that was the deeper motive: to ward off the lightningstroke. Then one day, without a word to anyone, without even a word to himself, he took one of her booksout of the library. After that he read everything, reading openly, in the train, at the lunch table. 'What areyou reading?' 'One of my mother's books.'He is in her books, or some of them. Other people too he recognizes; and there must be many more he doesnot recognize. About sex, about passion and jealousy and envy, she writes with an insight that shakes him.It is positively indecent.

She shakes him; that is what she presumably does to other readers too. That is presumably why, in thelarger picture, she exists. What a strange reward for a lifetime of shaking people: to be conveyed to thistown in Pennsylvania and given money! For she is by no means a comforting writer. She is even cruel, in away that women can be but men seldom have the heart for. What sort of creature is she, really? Not a seal:not amiable enough for that. But not a shark either. A cat. One of those large cats that pause as theyeviscerate their victim and, across the torn-open belly, give you a cold yellow stare.

There is a woman waiting for them downstairs, the same young woman who fetched them from the airport.Her name is Teresa. She is an instructor at Altona College, but in the business of the Stowe Award afactotum, a dogsbody, and in the wider business a minor character.

He sits in the front of the car beside Teresa, his mother sits at the rear. Teresa is excited, so excited that shepositively chatters. She tells them about the neighbourhoods they are driving through, about Altona Collegeand its history, about the restaurant they are headed for. In the middle of all the chatter she manages to getin two quick, mouselike pounces of her own. 'We had A. S. Byatt here last fall,' she says. 'What do youthink of A. S. Byatt, Ms Costello?' And later: 'What do you think of Doris Lessing, Ms Costello?' She iswriting a book on women writers and politics; she spends her summers in London doing what she callsresearch; he would not be surprised if she had a tape recorder hidden in the car.

His mother has a word for people like this. She calls them the goldfish. One thinks they are small andharmless, she says, because each wants no more than the tiniest nibble of flesh, the meresthemidemimilligram. She gets letters from them every week, care of her publisher. Once upon a time sheused to reply: thank you for your interest, unfortunately I am too busy to respond as fully as your letterdeserves. Then a friend told her what these letters of hers were fetching on the autograph market. After thatshe stopped answering.

Flecks of gold circling the dying whale, waiting their chance to dart in and take a quick mouthful.

They arrive at the restaurant. It is raining lightly. Teresa drops them at the door and goes off to park the car.For a moment they are alone on the pavement. 'We can still abscond,' he says. 'It is not too late. We canget a taxi, drop by the hotel to pick up our things, be at the airport by eight thirty, take the first flight out.We will have vanished from the scene by the time the Mounties arrive.'

He smiles. She smiles. They will go through with the programme, that barely needs to be said. But it is apleasure to toy with at least the idea of escape. Jokes, secrets, complicities; a glance here, a word there: thatis their way of being together, of being apart. He will be her squire, she will be his knight. He will protecther as long as he is able. Then he will help her into her armour, lift her on to her steed, set her buckler onher arm, hand her her lance, and step back.

There is a scene in the restaurant, mainly dialogue, which we will skip. We resume back at the hotel, whereElizabeth Costello asks her son to run through the list of the people they have just met. He obeys, givingeach a name and function, as in life. Their host, William Brautegam, is Dean of Arts at Altona. Theconvenor of the jury, Gordon Wheatley, is a Canadian, a professor at McGill, who has written on Canadianliterature and on Wilson Harris. The one they call Toni, who spoke to her about Henry Handel Richardson,is from Altona College. She is a specialist on Australia and has taught there. Paula Sachs she knows. Thebald man, Kerrigan, is a novelist, Irish by birth, now living in New York. The fifth juror, the one who wasseated next to him, is named Moebius. She teaches in California and edits a journal. She has also publishedsome stories.

'You and she had quite a tête-à-tête says his mother. 'Good- looking, isn't she?'

'I suppose so.'

She reflects. 'But, as a group, don't they strike you as rather…

'Rather lightweight?'

She nods.

'Well, they are. The heavyweights don't involve themselves in this kind of show. The heavyweights arewrestling with the heavy weight problems.'

'I am not heavyweight enough for them?'

'No, you're heavyweight all right. Your handicap is that you're not a problem. What you write hasn't yetbeen demonstrated to be a problem. Once you offer yourself as a problem, you might be shifted over intotheir court. But for the present you're not a problem, just an example.'

'An example of what?'

'An example of writing. An example of how someone of your station and your generation and your originswrites. An instance.'

'An instance? Am I allowed a word of protest? After all the effort I put into not writing like anyone else?'

'Mother, there's no point in picking on me to fight with. I am not responsible for the way the academy seesyou. But you must surely concede that at a certain level we speak, and therefore write, like everyone else.Otherwise we would all be speaking and writing private languages. It is not absurd - is it? - to concernoneself with what people have in common rather than with what sets them apart.'

The next morning John finds himself in another literary debate. In the hotel gymnasium he bumps intoGordon Wheatley, chairman of the jury. Side by side on exercise bicycles they have a shoutedconversation. His mother will be disappointed, he tells Wheatley - not entirely seriously - if she learns thatthe Stowe Award is hers only because 1995 has been decreed to be the year of Australasia.

'What does she want it to be?' shouts Wheatley back.

'That she is the best,' he replies. 'In your jury's honest opinion. Not the best Australian, not the bestAustralian woman, just the best.'

'Without infinity we would have no mathematics,' says Wheatley.

'But that doesn't mean that infinity exists. Infinity is just a construct, a human construct. Of course we arefirm that Elizabeth Costello is the best. We just have to be clear in our minds what a statement like thatmeans, in the context of our times.'

The analogy with infinity makes no sense to him, but he does not pursue the issue. He hopes that Wheatleydoes not write as badly as he thinks.

Realism has never been comfortable with ideas. It could not be otherwise: realism is premised on the ideathat ideas have no autonomous existence, can exist only in things. So when it needs to debate ideas, as here,realism is driven to invent situations - walks in the countryside, conversations - in which characters givevoice to contending ideas and thereby in a certain sense embody them. The notion of embodying turns outto be pivotal. In such debates ideas do not and indeed cannot float free: they are tied to the speakers bywhom they are enounced, and generated from the matrix of individual interests out of which their speakersact in the world - for instance, the son's concern that his mother not be treated as a Mickey Mouse post-colonial writer, or Wheatley's concern not to seem an old-fashioned absolutist.

At eleven he taps at the door of her room. She has a long day before her: an interview, a session at thecollege radio station, then, in the evening, the presentation ceremony and the speech that goes with it.

Her strategy with interviewers is to take control of the exchange, presenting them with blocks of dialoguethat have been rehearsed so often he wonders they have not solidified in her mind and become some kind oftruth. A long paragraph on childhood in the suburbs of Melbourne (cockatoos screeching at the bottom ofthe garden) with a sub-paragraph on the danger to the imagination of middle-class security A paragraph onthe death of her father of enteric fever in Malaya, with her mother somewhere in the background playingChopin waltzes on the piano, followed by a sequence of what sound like impromptu ruminations on theinfluence of music on her own prose. A paragraph about her adolescent reading (voracious, unselective),then a jump to Virginia Woolf, whom she first read as a student, and the impact Woolf had on her. Apassage on her spell at art school, another on her year and a half at post—war Cambridge ('What I mainlyremember is the struggle to keep warm'), another on her years in London ('I could have made a living as atranslator, I suppose, but my best language was German, and German wasn't popular in those days, as youcan imagine'). Her first novel, which she modestly disparages, though as a first novel it stood head andshoulders above the competition, then her years in France ('heady times'), with an oblique glance at herfirst marriage. Then her return to Australia with her young son. Him.

All in all, he judges, listening in, a workmanlike performance, if one can still use that word, eating up mostof the hour, as intended, leaving only a few minutes to skirt the questions that begin 'What do you think…?'What does she think about neoliberalism, the woman question, Aboriginal rights, the Australian noveltoday? He has lived around her for nearly four decades, on and off, and is still not sure what she thinksabout the big questions. Not sure and, on the whole, thankful not to have to hear. For her thoughts wouldbe, he suspects, as uninteresting as most people's. A writer, not a thinker. Writers and thinkers: chalk andcheese. No, not chalk and cheese: fish and fowl. But which is she, the fish or the fowl? Which is hermedium: water or air?

This morning's interviewer, who has come up from Boston for the occasion, is young, and his mother isusually indulgent towards the young. But this one is thick-skinned and refuses to be fobbed off. 'Whatwould you say your main message is?' she persists.

'My message? Am I obliged to carry a message?'

Not a strong counter; the interviewer presses her advantage.

'In The House on Eccles Street your lead character, Marion Bloom, refuses to have sex with her husbanduntil he has worked out who he is. Is that what you are saying: that until men have worked out a new, post-patriarchal identity women should hold them selves apart?'

His mother casts him a glance. Help! it is meant to say, in a droll way.

'Intriguing idea,' she murmurs, 'Of course in the case of Marion's husband there would be a particularseverity in demanding that he work out a new identity, since he is a man of - what shall I say? - of infirmidentity, of many shapes.'

Eccles Street is a great novel; it will live, perhaps, as long as Ulysses; it will certainly be around long afterits maker is in the grave. He was only a child when she wrote it. It unsettles and dizzies him to think thatthe same being that engendered Eccles Street engendered him. It is time to step in, save her from aninquisition that promises to become tedious. He rises. 'Mother, I am afraid we are going to have to call ahalt,' he says. 'We're being fetched for the radio session.' To the interviewer: 'Thank you, but that willhave to be all.'

The interviewer pouts with annoyance. Will she find a part for him in the story she files: the novelist offailing powers and her bossy son?

At the radio station the two of them are separated. He is shown into the control booth. The new interviewer,he is surprised to find, is the elegant Moebius woman he had sat beside at dinner. 'This is Susan Moebius,the programme is Writers at Work, and we are speaking today to Elizabeth Costello,' she commences, andproceeds with a crisp introduction. 'Your most recent novel,' she continues, 'called Fire and Ice, set in theAustralia of the 1930s, is the story of a young man struggling to make his way as a painter against theopposition of family and society, Did you have anyone in particular in mind when you wrote it? Does itdraw upon your own early life?'

'No, I was still a child in the 19305. Of course we draw upon our own lives all the time - they are our mainresource, in a sense our only resource. But no, Fire and Ice isn't autobiography. It is a work of fiction. Imade it up.'

'It is a powerful book, I must tell our listeners. But do you find it easy, writing from the position of a man?'

It is a routine question, opening the door to one of her routine paragraphs. To his surprise, she does not takethe opening.

'Easy? No. If it were easy it wouldn't be worth doing. It is the otherness that is the challenge. Making upsomeone other than yourself. Making up a world for him to move in. Making up an Australia.'

'Is that what you are doing in your books, would you say: making up Australia?'

'Yes, I suppose so. But that is not so easy nowadays. There is more resistance, a weight of Australias madeup by many other people, that you have to push against. That is what we mean by tradition, the beginningsof a tradition.'

'I'd like to get on to The House on Eccles Street, which is the book you are best known for in this country,a path-breaking book, and the figure of Molly Bloom. Critics have concentrated on the way you haveclaimed or reclaimed Molly from Joyce, made her your own. I wonder if you would comment on yourintentions in this book, particularly in challenging Joyce, one of the father figures of modern literature, onhis own territory

Another clear opening, and this time she takes it.

'Yes, she is an engaging person, isn't she, Molly Bloom - Joyce's Molly, I mean. She leaves her traceacross the pages of Ulysses as a bitch on heat leaves her smell. Seductive you can't call it: it is cruder thanthat. Men pick up the scent and sniff and circle around and snarl at each other, even when Molly isn't onthe scene.

'No, I don't see myself as challenging Joyce. But certain books are so prodigally inventive that there isplenty of material left over at the end, material that almost invites you to take it over and use it to buildsomething of your own.'

'But, Elizabeth Costello, you have taken Molly out of the house - if I can continue with your metaphor -taken her out of the house on Eccles Street where her husband and her lover and in a certain sense herauthor have confined her, where they have turned her into a kind of queen bee, unable to fly, you havetaken her and turned her loose on the streets of Dublin. Wouldn't you see that as a challenge to Joyce onyour part, a response?'

'Queen bee, bitch…Let's revise the figure and call her a lioness, rather, stalking the streets, smelling thesmells, seeing the sights. Looking for prey, even. Yes, I wanted to liberate her from that house, andparticularly from that bedroom, with the bed with the creaking springs, and turn her loose - as you say - onDublin.'

'If you see Molly - Joyce's Molly - as a prisoner in the house on Eccles Street, do you see women ingeneral as prisoners of marriage and domesticity?'

'You can't mean women today. But yes, to an extent Molly is a prisoner of marriage, the kind of marriagethat was on offer in Ireland in 1904. Her husband Leopold is a prisoner too. If she is shut into the conjugalhome, he is shut out. So we have Odysseus trying to get in and Penelope trying to get out. That is thecomedy, the comic myth, which Joyce and I in our different ways were paying our respects to.'

Because both women are wearing headphones, addressing the microphone rather than each other, it is hardfor him to see how they are getting on together. But he is impressed, as ever, by the persona his mothermanages to project: of genial common sense, lack of malice, yet of sharp-wittedness too.

'I want to tell you,' the interviewer continues (a cool voice, he thinks: a cool woman, capable, not alightweight at all), 'what an impact The House on Eccles Street made on me when I first read it in the1970s. I was a student, I had studied Joyce's book, I had absorbed the famous Molly Bloom chapter and thecritical orthodoxy that came with it, namely that here Joyce had released the authentic voice of thefeminine, the sensual reality of woman, and so forth. And then I read your book and realised that Mollydidn't have to be limited in the way Joyce had made her to be, that she could equally well be an intelligentwoman with an interest in music and a circle of friends of her own and a daughter with whom she sharedconfidences - it was a revelation, as I say. And I began to wonder about other women whom we think of ashaving been given a voice by male writers, in the name of their liberation, yet in the end only to further andto serve a male philosophy. I am thinking of D. H. Lawrence's women in particular, but if you go furtherback they might include Tess of the D' Urbervilles and Anna Karenina, to name only two. It is a hugequestion, but I wonder if you have anything to say about it - not just about Marion Bloom and the othersbut about the project of reclaiming women's lives in general.'

'No, I don't think there is anything I would want to say, I think you've expressed it all very fully. Ofcourse, fair's fair, men will have to set about reclaiming the Heathcliffs and Rochesters from romanticstereotyping too, to say nothing of poor old dusty Casaubon. It will be a grand spectacle. But, seriously, wecan't go on parasitizing the classics forever. I am not excluding myself from the charge. We've got to startdoing some inventing of our own.'

This is not in the script at all. A new departure. Where will it lead? But alas, the Moebius woman (who isnow glancing at the studio clock) does not pick up on it.

'In your more recent novels you have gone back to Australian settings. Could you say something abouthow you see Australia? What does it mean to you to be an Australian writer? Australia is a country thatremains very far away, at least to Americans. Is that part of your consciousness as you write: that you arereporting from the far edges?'

'The far edges. That is an interesting expression. You won't find many Australians nowadays prepared toaccept it. Far from what? they would say. Nevertheless, it has a certain meaning, even if it is a meaningfoisted on us by history. We're not a country of extremes - I'd say we're rather pacific - but we are acountry of extremities. We have lived our extremities because there hasn't been a great deal of resistance inany direction. If you begin to fall, there isn't much to stop you.'

They are back among the commonplaces, on familiar ground. He can stop listening.

We skip to the evening, to the main event, the presentation of the award. As son and companion of thespeaker he finds himself in the first row of the audience, among the special guests. The woman to his leftintroduces herself. 'Our daughter is at Altona,' she says. 'She is writing her honours dissertation on yourmother. She's a great fan. She has made us read everything.' She pats the wrist of the man beside her. Theyhave the look of money, old money. Benefactors, no doubt. 'Your mother is much admired in this country.Particularly by young people. I hope you will tell her that.'

All across America, young women writing dissertations on his mother. Admirers, adherents, disciples.Would it please his mother to be told she has American disciples?

The presentation scene itself we skip. It is not a good idea to interrupt the narrative too often, sincestorytelling works by lulling the reader or listener into a dreamlike state in which the time and space of thereal world fade away, superseded by the time and space of the fiction. Breaking into the dream drawsattention to the constructedness of the story, and plays havoc with the realist illusion. However, unlesscertain scenes are skipped over we will be here all afternoon. The skips are not part of the text, they are partof the performance.

So the award is made, after which his mother is left alone at the rostrum to give her acceptance speech,entitled in the programme 'What is Realism?'. The time has arrived for her to show her paces.

Elizabeth Costello dons her reading glasses. 'Ladies and gentle men,' she says, and begins to read.

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

[Elizabeth Costello] resonates in the mind long after it has been put aside. (John Banville, The Nation)

Editorial Reviews

[Elizabeth Costello] resonates in the mind long after it has been put aside. (John Banville, The Nation)

From the Publisher

Billed as fiction, this puzzling book by the new Nobel laureate in literature is more nebulously a collection of essays, all but two previously published, embedded within the story of an aging novelist, Elizabeth Costello, as she goes on the lecture circuit. Costello first appeared in Coetzee’s slender 1999 volume “The Lives of Animals,” in which she delivered a college address on animal rights, and that text is reprised here as part of eight “lessons” that she must give or receive, ranging in subject from literary realism to the problem of evil. Coetzee’s work has always been distinguished by cerebral rigor, which in his strongest novels propels narratives of claustrophobic and often savage intimacy. But here he seems to have lost faith in the power of storytelling; his heroine’s journey takes place almost entirely in the realm of the mind, and the effect is that of exploring a cold, depopulated planet.

The New Yorker

In his first work of fiction since Disgrace, Mr. Coetzee creates a formidable, even charismatic stand-in: a writer so dedicated to her work that she suggests "one of those large cats that pause as they eviscerate their victim and, across the torn-open belly, give you a cold yellow stare." If she is not precisely lovable, Elizabeth is still admirably fierce. Yet this book delves its way into her deepest doubts, culminating in a theatrical denouement teased out of Elizabeth's own affinity for the Kafkaesque. She is ultimately forced to explain her own writerly principles, including this one: "I believe in what does not bother to believe in me." — Janet Maslin

The New York Times

Old age offers no comforts, and that, for Coetzee, is its virtue. Costello has a passing but unforgettable encounter with its unpleasantnesses in a ladies' room outside the lecture hall in Amsterdam, where she has gone to hide after her talk has gone badly, as her talks usually do. As she sits on the toilet, this distinguished artist struggling to work through the implications of a code of literary ethics meant to protect the dignity of the powerless and the naked, a child scratches at the door and calls out to her mother in scornful Dutch that there's a woman in there, she can hear her. Costello hurriedly flushes and exits the stall, ''evading the eyes of mother and daughter.'' There is no justice in the ability of youth to shame age, and yet it's a fundamental fact of the embodied life. Coetzee's unflinching exploration of this desolate and strangely beautiful terrain represents the cruelest and best use to which literature can be put. — Judith Shulevitz

NY Times Sunday Book Review

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. (Oct. 20) Forecast: This is not the most accessible of Coetzee's novels, but it is an important addition to the author's body of work and heady reading for those who enjoy novels of ideas. Most of the book's chapters have been published separately, two as part of the nonfiction volume The Lives of Animals (Princeton, 1999). Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.

Publishers Weekly

Coetzee structures his latest novel around a series of lectures given by Elizabeth Costello, an eminent Australian novelist in the later years of her life, who is best known for her early feminist novel based on Joyce's Molly Bloom. The lectures are presented at awards ceremonies, as a guest speaker at an American university, and as part of the entertainment package aboard an Antarctic cruise ship. These philosophical inquiries cover topics ranging from realism to the African character to the nature of evil. In her longest and most passionate speech, Costello offers a spirited defense of animal rights, comparing the enslavement and slaughter of animals on factory farms to the treatment of the Jews by the Nazis. These addresses and her prickly behavior between lectures infuriate audiences and alienate her long-suffering family. But Costello's rigid morality and probing intelligence finally illuminate the fundamental question of what it means to be human. An intense and challenging novel; highly recommended for all libraries. [Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 7/03.]-Barbara Love, Kingston Frontenac P.L., Ont. Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.

Library Journal

Multiple Booker winner Coetzee (Disgrace, 2000, etc.) dramatizes—just barely—a celebrated Australian author’s considerations of "the humanities" as embodied in moral action. Coetzee’s eighth is a gathering of lectures and talks, framed by circumstances preceding and responses succeeding them, each involving elderly Elizabeth Costello (one of the narrators of Coetzee’s recent nonfiction Them Lives of Animals, 1999). Renowned as the writer of The House on Eccles Street (a novel about Molly Bloom), Elizabeth is invited to speak at various prestigious conferences, sometimes accompanied by her son, a college science teacher. At Williamstown, Pennsylvania, she usefully (if unoriginally) defines realism as a sense of being "embedded in life"; subsequent appearances in the US and abroad are dominated by her provocative comparisons of the slaughter of animals to Hitler’s genocidal mandate "to treat people like animals"; "The Problem of Evil" elicits her emotional response to a novel about Nazi Germany by Paul West—who also attends the Amsterdam conference at which she discusses it; and, in a final chapter that clearly reveals Coetzee’s debts to Kafka and Beckett, we see Elizabeth in purgatory, commanded to state what she believes, but willing only to declare her nonpartisan "negative capability." A page of acknowledgements affirms that Coetzee has here reimagined in semifictional form several of his recent nonfiction essays and lectures. The result is a disappointing hybrid that cannot, except by the loosest possible definition, be called fiction. Yet it does involve and pique one’s interest, saved from utter turgidity by its protagonist’s vividly delineated confusion anduncertainty at having taken positions that alienate her from other, equally rational and sensitive people (such as her older sister, a nun working heroically in Africa). As argument, literate, impassioned, and disturbing; as fiction, overemphatic and often dull. Perhaps only for Coetzee’s most ardent admirers.

Kirkus Reviews