Elizabeth Costello by J. M. Coetzee Summary and Reviews
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Book Reviews of Elizabeth Costello
Book Review: boring rambling
Summary: 1 Stars
Two big reasons I bought this book were "Disgrace" (a good Coetzee book that I read a few years ago) and the Nobel-Prize . This book turned out to be pure drivel. So much so that I gave up reading half way through. Many weeks later, I picked up the book again. I did finish it this time, but this is, absolutely, the most boring book I have ever read. It rambles on and on. Not to say that books that ramble are all boring or not good to read, but this one definitely is.Book Review: brilliant and challenging
Summary: 5 Stars
A brilliant and sometimes challenging work of fiction that shows there is life in the idea of the novel yet, and also that the Nobel people aren't so hung up on manifesto writing as I thought. Coetzee has some fun in this book, but it is well worth the ride. I find some of the other reviews here incomprehensible in their response: the size of the author's name compared to the title is a decision usually made by the publisher, not the author, and should be considered, particularly in this case, irrelevent - Coetzee has won many awards so of course the publisher is going to want his name up there to attract attention; if you need to define a 'reading pedigree' to justify a negative view, then you are probably bluffing on a pair of deuces; the price of the book on the second hand market only proves something that Wilde once wrote, that many people know the price of everything but the value of nothing; the book is NOT a manifesto on ethical vegatarianism - while Elizabth Costello herself maintains many things, ethical vegetarianism being one of those, there are many responses to her positions in the book, and some of her rejoinders to their responses are quite weak to say the least. What about her breakdown in the car with her son after the university debate? Sometimes, it seems as though people have only read a readers digest version...Book Review: hmmm...
Summary: 2 Stars
Graham Greene (who should have won the Nobel prize; it's a Disgrace that he didn't) called his lesser efforts "entertainments." Coetzee's lesser efforts could be called "exercises," and would include Diary of a Bad Year, and Elizabeth Costello, his lessest. He must have thought, wouldn't it be interesting if .... er, well, not really, it turns out. Nothing wrong with the format, the set-up, aok; it's what Coetzee does with it, and that's very little. I liked the reveal about the liaison years before with the other lecturer and was hoping for more of the same, maybe more of the relationship with her son ... but it didn't happen. And the Holocuast stuff was very heavy-handed, hard to believe too that either Coetzee or Costello would still be peddling the long-debunked Jews-into-soap line; in fact that she does only serves to make her seem uneducated: so why listen to a lecture by her?
The good news is that such a good writer can write average stuff; writers of the world take heart.
Book Review: swill if didn't have indigestible chunks
Summary: 1 Stars
Coatzee has written some great books. But this probably ranks among the worst book every published by a great writer. Inexcusable to package a bunch of drivelly philosophy as though were part of a novel. And then to pile another, disparate bunch of ditherings from a different errant jag. Still, worse, to yoke it all together without any narrative spine, no characters, no theme, nothing! What an insult! Queremos tanto a Coetzee, if other readers get my drift...Book Review: this book will stay with me
Summary: 5 Stars
"Elizabeth Costello" is unlike any other book I have read: not exactly a novel, but a series of fictional meditations on the life of the mind, its joys and its perils. Coetzee's unfailingly economical, enigmatic, yet poetic voice blew me away. Brilliant.