The biography of a fictional writer/academic portrayed by her lectures throughout her life. An interesting technique, but I found it too gimmicky and made me feel too removed from the character, which seemed to really be Coetzee himself. ( )

While some of the stories are compelling, others just kind of lie there. I like his exploration of the nature of reality in fiction. ( )

A wonderful book about life and the end of life in essay-style chunks. I loved the way the book critiqued literature by manifesting the criticism in the text. ( )

this book completely knocked me on my ass and shocked me, frankly. i wasn't coming to it expecting anything--never read coetzee, this book "just happened to be there" used, etc etc...i guess it was too weird and therefore "self-indulgent" for critics and readers, but i love stuff like this. and the ending treatment was great. ( )

This was a quirky novel, but a really enjoyable read. Rather than “Chapters,” the book is divided into “Lessons.” It is the story of last years of an Australian author, living off the reputation of an early, award winning novel, The House on Eccles Street. This work is a retelling of the story of Molly Bloom (of Joyce’s Ulysses).
Coetzee writes, “Isn’t that what is most important about fiction: that it takes us out of ourselves, into other lives?” (23). Coetzee more than practices what he preaches here. I felt her aches and pains, her emotions, anguished moments, and struggles with sons and a daughter-in-law. All were vivid and drew me into the life of this interesting woman. Elizabeth Costello brims with discussions about literature, reading, writing, but as her life progresses, it spirals down to some rather confusing discussions about animal rights. The last “Lesson” is really worth working your way towards. I haven’t read much Coetzee, and, I admit, I only bought this because he won the Nobel Prize, but that is my custom. In this case, I am glad I did! I will be searching for more of his work.
By the way, he is listed as a South African writer, but he lives in Australia now. Elizabeth Costello was born in Africa, but moved to Australia. Hmmm. Definitely five stars –- despite the PETA stuff!
--Jim, 6/14/2007 ( )

I read Elisabeth Costello with a great deal of attention and was swept up into some of the philosophical arguments. I saw it, finally, as a kind of argument between the author and some of the challenges of the modern literary world. Elisabeth herself seemed to be a mixture of Coetzee and someone like Doris Lessing – at any rate a member of the literary intelligentsia. One of the other characters – a womaniser and a bit of a charlatan – must surely be based on Ben Okri – but he was probably meant to be some kind of amalgam of the black African male writer.
The end passage is all about belief. Elisabeth resides in a small town, trying to persuade a jury (of her peers?) to let her through the gate to the next world. She is in an after-life; but I don’t think Coetzee believes in an after-life at all and this is just another tease.
I feel his aim was to set up an eternal dilemma: what, finally, can we say we believe in? Elisabeth at first says, “Nothing.”, or that belief is not important – and that belief can only be a matter of personal interpretation. As a writer, she is a kind of secretary waiting to be called to write the next chapter that the world dictates to her. That’s not enough for the jury, so she has to go away and rewrite her submission. She then says she believes in the world as a natural phenomenon and cites the tiny frogs of her homeland who burrow beneath the earth each autumn and come alive again joyously each spring. But that’s not enough – she’s sent away again, another rewrite called for. There we leave her (which suggests that Coetzee thinks there’s no better answer, no greater revelation than for us to believe in our senses, in the world as it exists for us?). Is the jury waiting for Elisabeth to cite faith in God? If so, Coetzee seems to refuse this as, perhaps, the final betrayal of his humanist beliefs. Perhaps he also wants to suggest that the ‘jury’ is part of the ultimate failure of human endeavour? That there will always be judgement made at the end of life and it will always be found wanting?
Thinking about it now, nine months after reading the book, I’m inclined to think I missed the meaning of the closing epiphanical passage – that we human beings may not be equal to the blazing revalations of the world, that all our great brains have given us is the ability to know that we have lost our way. The simplicity, beauty and joy of existence is something that we no longer recognise in our overwhelming materiality. We have lost the capacity for revelation through experience and have ended up searching for it within ourselves - the very place where it cannot reside. ( )

It could have been subtitled- The Tortured Soul of a Writer
The author speaks through his alter ego- a fellow writer, Elizabeth Costello, and comments in Eight Lessons on issues relevant to him and centering around writing. The tortures of a writer are all there: from feeling different, irrelevant, ridiculous and ambiguous, through not knowing what one’s beliefs are anymore (because one has repeated them so often they have lost meaning), to being unable to express them anymore altogether. The book goes full circle from the author giving a lecture on Kafka’s Ape to the author him/herself finding him/herself in the same situation as the Ape.

It is a very interesting book, very beautifully written, full of interesting ideas and literary references. It is a real feast for anybody who likes literary meanderings with many literary references, a tortured main character, and an unusual form: fiction, non-fiction, meta-fiction- all in one. Delicious!

I felt vaguely disappointed and vaguely cheated at first when I realized that the majority of the lectures in the book had been published before as separate pieces, but then realized that by providing personal commentary to them, Coetze achieved a different level of commentary on writing. The torture of producing them is all there and feels real. The fear of ridicule and the fear that they are clichés is palpable.

Let me add that this form is also very safe- the author can always deny everything the book says and say it is a piece of fiction. Or, maybe through Costello, Coetze delivers what he is too shy to deliver himself- his thoughts out loud to live audiences. And maybe he is afraid to do it precisely because he is afraid that if he is going to speak frankly, they may be disasters, just like most Costello’s lectures were. ( )

This is a strange book: a series of lectures on the nature of man's relationship with God and to other life forms, particularly primates. It becomes a series of inquisitions at the hands of doubters and law makers, adumbrated through the novel as 'before the law' scenes reminiscent of Kafka and Dostoevsky. Some parts work better for me than others, though I found the final viva, 'statement of belief', tedious, and the final letter to Francis Bacon (The Postscript) bizarre. Nevertheless an intriguing book crammed with the history of thought, and I look forward to Elizabeth Costello's appearance in Coetzee's next novel, 'The lost (sic) man'.

Those were the notes I made in my reading diary just over a year ago. I like my slip in substituting 'lost' for 'slow'. Coetzee is a fascinating writer, always experimenting - always taking on the big questions - finding new ways within (or via) narrative to find ourselves. But unlike so many of his other works, infact all, this novel does not hang in my mind - even 'Slow man' which for me petered out at the end. ( )

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. comprehensive and satisfying. (Los Angeles Times Book Review) working of the mysterious law of the universe, touching the human in his very attempts to record the dying animal within us. (The Boston Globe) put aside. (John Banville, The Nation) provoking... Coetzee's prose is flawless. (Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel) Chronicle)

Author Biography: J. M. Coetzee is the author of numerous works of fiction and nonfiction, including Life & Times of Michael K and Disgrace, both of which were awarded the Booker Prize. He is the recipient of the 2003 Nobel Prize in Literature, among many other literary awards. Coetzee is a professor of social thought at the University of Chicago.

FROM THE CRITICS

The New York Times

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

NY Times Sunday Book Review

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

The New Yorker

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.

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.

an unusual, but intriguing novel. a challenging delight. i look forward to more of Elizabeth's character in Slow Man. ( )

http://donutgirl.livejournal.com/3117... ( )