Elizabeth Costello by J. M. Coetzee Summary and Reviews
|
List Price: Our Price: $4.56 You Save: $10.44 (70%) Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days Buy Used: from $0.84 (click here) Category: Book See more book details and other editions |
|---|
Book Reviews of Elizabeth Costello
Book Review: Profound
Summary: 4 Stars
"Can we be one with a god profoundly enough to apprehend, to get a sense of, a god's being? A question that no one seems to ask any more...Other modes of being. That may be a more decent way of phrasing it. Are there other modes of being besides what we call the human into which we can enter; and if there are not, what does that say about us and our limitations? She does not know much about Kant, but it sounds to her a Kantian kind of question."- Coetzee, Elizabeth Costello.
"The critical ontology of ourselves has to be considered not, certainly, as a theory, a doctrine, nor even as a permanent body of knowledge that is accumulating; it has to be conceived as an attitude, an ethos, a philosophical life in which the critique of what we are is at one and the same time the historical analysis of the limits that are imposed on us and an experiment with the possibility of going beyond them." - Michel Foucault, What Is Enlightenment?
"We do not know what the body can do..."- Baruch Spinoza, Ethics
This is a rather difficult novel, largely because I think one requires a considerable amount of philosophical background to engage with it properly. This is not to say that an intuitive reading would be inferior- indeed the book is deeply poetic in a way that Derrida's "Postcard", Bataille's "Inner Experience" or Deleuze & Guattari's "Thousand Plateaus" are- but the book is so unlike anything else Coetzee has done that I fear few will read the book with the rigor it deserves. In particular, I find the text to be especially close to Spinoza, the Dutch monist whose thought resonates throughout Coetzee's musings on animals and the animal (shamanistic) becomings of which human beings are capable. Coetzee, like Spinoza, thinks in terms of singularities, not abstractions, in literal terms and not metaphorical ones. As cerebral as the text can be, the book is really about the impassable shortcomings of the vainglorious intellect.
On the surface, the cosmetic veneer of the text, the book articulates Coetzee's position on a variety of philosophical disputes: idealism versus materialism, hellenistic pantheism and christian transcendence, the question of humanism, the blackmail of rationalism, the nature of desire. Scrape beneath the varnish, however, and you discover that the book is really a protracted meditation on writing- what impels the writer to write? What impetus could there possibly be for such an activity? What is the place of truth in fiction? What is literature's relationship with the rationalist legacy, is it a handmaiden of the Enlightenment? Should it presume to instruct, to legislate, to demarcate the frontiers between Good and Evil? Is literature judgment?
The text's poignant beauty becomes more and more evident as Elizabeth Costello comes to realise, in the twilight of her life, that she is bereft of answers. Why write? The impenetrable enigma. For all of Elizabeth's eloquence, each lesson ends in ambivalence, reticence and eventual silence. Perhaps, Coetzee suggests, this silence, this sense of surrender, is what great literature aspires towards, a revelation of the mystery before which we must remain mute. Is this not the 'lesson' of 'At The Gate'? All of our dreams have proven to be mirages, even art can no longer save us from ourselves. The ruse of language has shepherded us back into Plato's cave, condemning us to an eternity of rhetorical jousting and semantical hairsplitting. We are ensnared by syllogistics, blinkered by logic.
Still, the world remains in all of its extravagant splendor, and we stand before infinity, oblivious to its terrible beauty. One need not search for truth, the thing-in-itself, it is before one's eyes at every given instant. Why write, then, when all discursive expression falters before the incomprehensible vastness of the world? As Beckett told us repeatedly, literature fails. Literature is essentially ornamental, a fanciful, all-too-human embellishment that is of absolutely no consequence sub specie aeternitatis. The final illumination in "Elizabeth Costello" provides the only answer writers have ever known- because art is our form of worship, a deification of life. To write is to rhapsodize, to partake in the boundless ecstasy of the gods, to give thanks for the incomparable gift of being alive.
Book Review: Seeking Coetzee's Purpose
Summary: 5 Stars
I find the writing curiouser and curiouser as I make my way through "Elizabeth Costello". About writers and writing, about critics and criticism, about fiction and philosophy, sex and religion, about the encounter between the objective and the relative and most curious of all about a Lady Chandos writing to Francis Bacon in 1603??? And all of it woven around lectures?? What's it all about?
It's all fascinating, written with a diamond like rhetoric -hard and brilliantly controlled; filled with arcane literary fact and wisdom, bold enough to bring even a living writer into its debate (Paul West and his novel about the failed assassination of Hitler while leaving West as a character to sit as a silent shade in the background while the elderly Elizabeth chatters at him like a school girl). What is it all about this story of a once sexy now wilting old lady who'd written one famous book based on another famous book and how she goes about the planet provoking academics and religionists who wish only to praise and honor her? Is this about a fictional writer or is it about the author or what? Perhaps it is poetry.
With my curiosity at the highest pitch on having read the Lady Chandos letter - is this another invention [Elizabeth Chandos, Elizabeth Costello???] ???? - I Googled Chandos and found: "LETTER OF ELIZABETH, LADY CHANDOS, TO FRANCIS BACON, a brief new work by J.M. COETZEE
The Letter is a plea from Elizabeth Chandos written not long after a similar letter from her husband, also addressed to Francis Bacon. In her letter, she too tries to convey some idea of their growing estrangement from words and language.
"The Letter of Lord Chandos", by Hugo von Hofmannsthal, is a remarkable work, not only in the career of the author, but in the history of literature. While Hofmannsthal did not, like his character Philip Chandos, forsake writing altogether, his publication of this piece coincided with a significant change of his focus as a writer. Now, J.M. Coetzee adds a new voice to the correspondence, speaking through Philip's wife Elizabeth appending same to "Elizabeth Costello".
This of course required that I google Hugo Von Hofmannsthal and Chandos where I found the following from the New York Review of Books site: "The most influential of all of Hofmannsthal's writings is the title story, a fictional letter to the English philosopher Francis Bacon in which Lord Chandos explains why he is no longer able to write. The "Letter" not only symbolized Hofmannsthal's own turn away from poetry, it captured the psychological crisis of faith and language which was to define the twentieth century."
(...)
So what is the purpose of all my compulsive searching? Well, the best way I can plumb Coetzee's objective in writing Elizabeth Costello is to work backward. Von Hofmannsthal's letter is about no longer being able to write poetry. In the letter, Von Hoffmanstahl has Chandos say, "My case, in short, is this: I have lost completely the ability to think or to speak of anything coherently." Isn't this complaint made visual in the paintings of that time (Modernism, the early years of the 20th ce ) when deliberately fragmented paintings like Nude Descending were created? Isn't this part of the heritage of the Enlightenment, perhaps the dark side of the Enlightenment, when the old forms, the old dispensations are no longer potent to the artist? 1900 was hardly a time when a serious artist could follow the lead of a Raphael.
And isn't this Elizabeth Costello's problem, the writer who no longer writes; who, instead, goes about the world challenging the beliefs of others and is unable stuck in Limbo on the brink of heaven to proclaim a belief of her own?
Enough to say that Coetzee using a metaphorical character (perhaps an allegorical character), is probing a catastrophe, a state of perhaps irremediable ruin in the planetary culture, a time when all belief is challenged and targeted.
One last quote from the end of the novel and excerpted from Elizabeth's letter to Francis Bacon, "All is allegory, says my Philip. ... Drowning, we write out of our separate fates. Save us."
Yes. I think Elizabeth Costello is poetry, poetry demonstrating Coetzee's power to keep poetry alive. And by the way, don't we identify Bacon with the onset of the the Enlightenment?
Book Review: Tout nu
Summary: 5 Stars
In this more or less loosely constructed novel built around lectures given by the author's double, the Australian writer Elisabeth Costello, J. M. Coetzee puts himself `tout nu' by tackling head-on all important human issues as there are literature (writing and the responsibility of the writer), evil (holocausts), religion, the ravages of politics, the role of the university or sex.
Literature, the miracle of writing and crisis
Books are put better together than the writer, whose aim is to live on through its creatures (seeking immortality) and to measure himself against the masters. `His business is to bring inert matter to life or opening eyes to human depravity (shaking people).'
But the writer has also responsibilities, for `certain things are not good to read or to write.'
Like the great writer H. Von Hofmannsthal in `The Lord Chandos Letter' (quoted in this novel), an author has also self-doubts: `has everything she has said, all her finger-pointing and accusing, been not only wrong-headed, but mad, completely mad?'
Evil (against animals)
In extremely harsh words, J.M. Coetzee denounces the places of death (the slaughterhouses) around us, making evil a banality. `Each day a fresh holocaust, yet our moral being is untouched.' `At the bottom, we protect our own kind. Thumbs up to human babies, thumbs down to veal calves.
Evil (by religion)
Christianism killed everything: `the Greeks were damned, the Indians were damned, the Zulus were damned', because `extra ecclesiam nulla salvatio.'
`We need Hellenism as an alternative to Christianity. We should not live in the hereafter but in the here and now.'
Evil (by universities)
The core of the universities today is moneymaking. The Studio humanitatis died as sterile text analysis (textual scholarship).
Evil (by politics)
The author's target here are the Europeans and their historical guilt for the extermination of whole peoples, for its wars and its colonialism: `Europe has spread across the world like a cancer, until today it ravages life forms, animals, plants, habitats, languages.'
Dream
The author's nirvana is the classless society or a world from which poverty, disease, illiteracy, racism, sexism, homophobia, xenophobia and the rest of the bad litany have been exorcised.
Sex
In the former USSR, people were fed up with lectures about communism. To attract at least some audience, party members had to invent teasing titles like `The three Forms of Love'. Of course, the lecture room was packed. The speaker began his lecture as follows: the first form of love, heterosexuality, is, I hope, known by everybody. The second form of love, homosexuality is, as you know, forbidden in our country. So, there rests only the third form of love for our lecture today and that is the love of the people for our Party. (courtesy A. Zinoviev)
So, for the subject of sex, one should read J.M. Coetzee's novel. It's very rewarding.
All in all, J.M. Coetzee's message is loud and clear: `We cannot live thus; each creature is key to all other creatures.'
This book is a must read for all lovers of world literature and for all Coetzee fans.
Book Review: When the creator and his creation are genial
Summary: 5 Stars
J. M. Coetzee's latest effort "Elizabeth Costello" is a book that defies classification. This not actually a novel, but it is not a work of non-fiction as well. It is fiction, however distant of the classic model of what we call novel, the book is sort of a novel -- for the lack of a better word. This is a book that releases a new category of its own.
"Elizabeth Costello" follows the fictional writer Elizabeth Costello around the world when she goes to many countries to give lectures and receive prizes. Being in her 60s' makes of Mrs. Costello a wise woman and a person who doesn't seek popular-ity or celebrity -- just like her creator, Coetzee. Moreover, she is not even interested in spreading her philosophies. She goes to the events and talk about what she thinks because she feels she has to.
It kind of relieving to find someone like her nowadays -- when most `famous' people (writers, actors, politicians etc) want to be more and more famous and make more and more money and show how politically correct they are. Mrs. Costello is a way beyond that. While her speeches and ideas are quite radical --albeit very interesting-- she is not interested in changing people's mind, in making a homogenized world. She sort of likes the difference -- as long as people don't hurt animals.
The level of enjoyment of "Elizabeth Costello" for each reader depends on the fact that she/he agrees with what Mrs. Costello defends. If one is totally against her beliefs -- what would make this person really bad-- this reader won't certainly stand the book. For some, Mrs. Costello can be too radical, far-fetched, but it seems that this was Coetzee's idea to talk to his audience. One doesn't have to be and act like her, but believing in what she does is a great beginning to make this a better world.
Elizabeth Costello is such a believable character that at some point we forget that this is Coetzee's voice using her as a puppet to divulge his ideas. This is one of the cases when the creation seems to assume its own life. Many times the reader is likely to find him/herself urging to read "The House on Eccles Street", a book that Mrs. Costello published in 1969. In this novel, her best-known work, the writer gives Molly Bloom ("Ulysses"'s Ulysses's wife) her own story. Reading "Elizabeth Costello" we hear so much about her book that it is impossible not to long for reading it. Unfortunately there is no such book published.
In "Elizabeth Costello" Coetzee uses the insider experience to talk about feelings that many writers have to face. And so do readers. The most exploited is the frustration. In her speeches and lectures, Mrs. Costello never manages to please her audience and herself. She always leaves the conference that either there is something missing, or that it was really really awful. With that, the writer is saying that many times readers idealize their favorite writer -- or something like that.
Coetzee is one of the contemporary writers who are not interested in becoming famous or making tons of money (just like gazillions that we know). And as a consequence is that his prose is very honest. He doesn't want to please people; he wants to be food for thought. The read food for thought -- not pseudo intellectual exoteric writers who claim to be genius. Just like his Elizabeth Costello.
Book Review: an overly cerebral, boring mess
Summary: 2 Stars
I have read some wonderful novels by Coetzee, and so without hesitation I purchased 'Elizabeth Costello'. What a mistake! 'Elizabeth Costello' is really not so much of a novel but rather a forum for the other to pontificate on a whole slew of life and death philosophical matters. Such verbage might be of interest to the top 0.1% of the populace with multiple doctorates and too much time on their hands. For everyone else it's simply the sort of book that screams out "don't read me!".
Bottom line: maybe better served as fodder for a doctoral thesis?