Elizabeth Costello by J. M. Coetzee Summary and Reviews
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Book Reviews of Elizabeth Costello
Book Review: A drama of ideas in collision . . .
Summary: 5 Stars
Unlike most of what passes for literature today, "Elizabeth Costello" is in a class by itself. For the most part, it is a rhetorical novel, structured as a series of lectures and debates that make up what in academic circles would be called discourse - on a number of topics ranging from postcolonial literature to animal rights to salvation, evil, and sexuality. These are woven into a number of themes including celebrity, ageing, gender, and travel. The characters are strongly drawn and the novel is thick with literary devices that make reading it richly rewarding for the reader who enjoys irony, allusions to other works of literature, the interplay of fictional and nonfictional, and experiments in postmodern storytelling.
What the novel does not have (and the negative reviews here reflect this) is a strong plot line. There is dramatic conflict, all right, but it has more to do with collisions between people with strongly held ideas. As the novel progresses, it also concerns deepening inner conflicts as the main character's self-confidence slowly erodes until at the end she is no longer sure of what she believes. But a story with a beginning, middle and end in the traditional sense this is not, and for readers who like being drawn on by a well-crafted plot, this book will be a disappointment. Neither does the book have sympathetic characters to identify with; all of them are likely to set your teeth on edge.
Though the events in the novel are more or less chronological - except for the occasional flashback - the novel is not linear in the way that one thing follows necessarily from another. When I got to the end (fully surprised by the last sections), I found myself retracing my steps, looking for connections I had missed along the way. And thinking about the book in its totality, I began to see it as a kind of Rubik's Cube, capable of being seen from many points of view and assembled and reassembled into many different patterns. In that regard, a reader could easily start over from page 1 and discover a whole new novel.
I recommend this book to readers who like an intellectual challenge and are willing to forego plot and easily likable characters. It is full of rewards for those who like to entertain unconventional ideas.
Book Review: Animal-Rights Treatise, But Not A Novel
Summary: 2 Stars
"Elizabeth Costello" could have been a masterful work. All the ingredients are there - important themes, psychological insight, believable characters, and above all a finely honed literary craftsmanship.
Unfortunately for the reader, Coetzee's approach to his theme is too heavy-handed to be endured. This is a compendium of philosophical ramblings in the guise of fiction, and the result is a monotone. The protagonist Elizabeth's endless rants against meat-eaters "consume" the novel.
I enjoy and admire Coetzee's prose style, and truly wanted to love this book. However, the lectures and rants on animal rights went on for dozens of pages. Indeed, the book's chapters are titled as "lessons". That should have been my first clue that this was not a novel. (I have read elsewhere that the novel was not shortlisted for the prestigious Booker Prize because the judges decided that "Elizabeth Costello" in fact it was not a novel, and thus not eligible.)
The novel's shrillness earn it only two stars.
Book Review: Costello's (and Coetzee's) "curse on literature"
Summary: 3 Stars
The fictional Elizabeth Costello is a renowned author whose biography shares a few characteristics with Coetzee himself--although it's unclear whether she is truly his doppelganger or his punching bag. An often-exhausted globetrotter who accepts invitations to lecture at academic conferences and aboard luxury ocean-liners, she alternates between righteousness and incoherence, syllogism and emotion, passion and jet lag. Her fictional lectures and experiences are presented as eight "lessons" in Coetzee's "non-non-fiction" (to borrow the term coined by a British reviewer), and they range in subject from animal rights to the future of the novel to a Kafkaesque reckoning outside the Pearly Gates. Throughout, the meta outweighs the fiction--somewhat like the tension between subject and author in A. S. Byatt's "The Biographer's Tale."
My reaction to this slim collection wavers between frustration and fascination; it is, as James Wood notes, "a series of philosophical dialogues bound into rather fitful fiction," and the lines between fact and fiction, between author and character, are drawn in shifting sand. Elizabeth Costello herself is a bundle of contradictions, and her relationships with her son, sister, fellow authors, and critics are both recognizable and believable--although these disappointingly infrequent scenes seem almost beside the point. The lectures themselves, however, are a bit exasperating. The experience at times, I'm afraid, was not unlike reading Ayn Rand or Robert Heinlein, with Elizabeth Costello stepping into the hectoring role of John Galt or Jubal Harshaw.
Indeed, a decade ago, when Coetzee first delivered the pair of lectures on animal rights (published originally in "The Lives of Animals"), Peter Singer noted in response that the character of Elizabeth Costello serves as an ultimately evasive device, allowing Coetzee to advance principles without committing himself to them. Along those lines, "Elizabeth Costello" includes a book review of sorts--of a very real novel by a very real writer ("The Very Rich Hours of Count von Stauffenberg" by Paul West). Costello plans to condemn the novel's graphic depiction of evil but mostly chickens out after she discovers West will be in the audience. The reader, however, is treated to the substance of the argument Costello (Coetzee?) is too cowardly to make to West's face--an argument that, not incidentally, could just as easily be made against Costello's (and Coetzee's) own fiction. It's almost as if Coetzee wants to have it both ways, wrangling with "controversial" topics he has addressed in other forums, but able to disassociate himself from the more extreme sophistries by claiming that not he, but his faintly ridiculous (even dotty) protagonist, is responsible for them.
Some critics have argued that, taken as a whole, these eight lessons reveal a master plan--they serve as a late-career "confession" (James Wood), or they present "a disillusionment with the value our culture attributes to literature" (David Lodge). While I doubt that this repackaging of Coetzee's coy non-non-fiction is as cohesive as its fans might claim, there is certainly a theme running through each of its segments: a self-effacing attempt to minimize the importance of fiction. In the end, before a disenchanted Elizabeth Costello finally declares "a curse on literature," she ponders, "What good has it done me, this life of writing, now that it comes to the final proving?" Readers may well wonder the same thing, if not about literature then perhaps about this book.
Book Review: Daring Philosophy
Summary: 4 Stars
Others have justly praised this work for daring to be philosophical. It is certainly that and in some ways as such fails as satisfying fiction. It is episodic and is constructed as a series of essays or lectures as much as a novel. What I found satisfying was not its ideas but rather the underlying emotions that tie the episodes together. I liked the use of relations and adversaries who interrogate Elizabeth's philosophy on non-philosophical grounds. I thought in particular that the daughter-in-law was persuasive and amusing in her analysis of Elizabeth's ideas on eating as mere power-plays. Ideas in the context of power is a theme well-developed and worth-while. The episodes are also noteworthy as exemplars of fluidity; Coetzee writes an accessible prose that brings home his ideas while making them part of the daily stream rather than as merely challenging and obscure. Even the cruise ship lecturers amused in the opening episode; the African among the white passengers functions much as does Elizabeth at the American college to disturb and challenge even if they are ultimately made to seem irrelevant by the flow of everyday life which seems to make thinking an alien exercise.Book Review: Don't buy this book
Summary: 1 Stars
I have read Mr. Coetzee's literary criticism and found it worth the effort. He should stick to what he does well, which is not writing fiction. This is just barely a novel, only because the form is so broad that almost any long piece of prose can qualify. But it is not an interesting novel, though the main character might have been interesting if she were free of the shackles of the overwrought essays that Coetzee puts in this poor woman's mouth. If you have purchased this book, then I recommend that you read the last half, where Elizabeth is occasionally given a chance to come to life and not simply be a mouthpiece. If you are a teacher and want to punish your students for some good reason, make them read the first half.Elizabeth Costello