Elizabeth Costello (2003)

One of those books whose images stay with you but gosh, I didn't care. I just didn't care. Read this review instead.

I was describing it to a friend and she said, oh, a grade twelve book. By which she meant a book you're assigned to study in high school. ( )

Interesting. The narrative here functions as a framing device for several lectures / monologues that, if I understand correctly, were written and/or presented before the story came together. And so we get a series of spirited discussions on meat-eating, censorship, the African novel and so on. All of it knee-deep in literary allusions and informed by a literature-heavy views on beauty, truth and the meaning of life. Much of the pleasure of this book is to read a talented professional's musings on novels, novel-writing and literature in general.

Unfortunately, Elizabeth Costello is very much a writer's book, a novel written for writers or lit-crit majors. I suppose that there's plenty here for non-specialists to enjoy, but I wouldn't recommend this book to anyone who isn't at least mildly interested in an academic or theoretical approach to writing. Coetzee lost me towards the end, I must admit. While I do have some background in literary studies (limited though that may be), and I was able to hang in there for the most part, the final chapter and the post-script letter I just didn't get. I had to look those up to understand what Coetzee was trying to get at. Which might not be a bad thing in and of itself, but it did make this a non-self-contained reading experience for me. But perhaps that was the point.

Still, despite the obscure allusions, I found myself looking forward to reading this book. Approached as a set of essays or lectures, this book worked for me. As a novel, much less. ( )

Coetzee's alter ego(s)? ( )

Read it because Albert lent it to me from Anna. Intensely disliked the lecture format and was tired of the last chapter "portals of heaven" before even starting it. Later discovered the book is a collection of lectures Coetzee gave, put into the mouth of this unpleasant old woman.
Well written, of course, as I did read it all. Still Yuk.

This was a really strange novel. You can’t win the Nobel Prize without being a bit strange to read. I don’t think, on the whole, that I enjoyed this at all. And I struggled to get the point of it.

It started out okay with the writer kind of doing the literary equivalent of breaking the fourth wall, so to speak, by addressing the reader about how a novel is constructed. But this seemed to fall by the wayside and, as I was enjoying that, I felt like someone had left me after starting to play a game with me.

The book follows an aging novelist as she gives lectures around the world, and is invited to speak in places where she is rarely well-known and never understood. It’s pretty depressing overall and is possibly about the way that we age and become more myopic as we do.

There are also some extracts from her life, which I appreciated more than the lectures and the debates that she enters into. I really didn’t get those.

The book is basically way over my head, with literary and philosophical references I would never even want to understand. I still like Coetzee, but this is right at the bottom of his pile for me. ( )