Elizabeth Costello
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
Belief may be no more, in the end, than a source of energy, like a battery which one clips into an idea to make it run.
Elizabeth Costello is a distinguished Australian author in her mid-sixties celebrated for a novel she wrote decades earlier. In a series of eight ‘lessons’—the transcripts of lectures and speeches—she examines such subjects as animal rights, evil and the afterlife. Published in 2003, Elizabeth Costello was the first book J. M. Coetzee published in his new home of Australia. With its blurring of the lines between fiction and non-fiction, its rigorous interrogation of weighty ideas and moments of bleak comedy, the novel issued a new and complex challenge to Coetzee’s readers.
J. M. Coetzee was the first author to win the Booker Prize twice and was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2003. His work includes Waiting for the Barbarians, Life and Times of Michael K, The Master of Petersburg, Disgrace and Diary of a Bad Year. He lives in Adelaide.
‘So bold and so clever that one wants to call it something other than a novel, to take it out of that commonplace genre.’ Times Literary Supplement
‘The book, one of Coetzee’s best, simply burns with creative passion.’ Independent
‘A readable and engaging book. Demanding, playful, provocative…hugely enlightening and rewarding.’ Sunday Times
‘In this strange but deeply satisfying book, Coetzee combines the two aspects of his literary personality in ways that may challenge some readers’ preconceptions about the relationship between imaginative and critical writing.’ Sydney Morning Herald
‘Hypnotic and, in the end, irresistible.’ Australian Book Review
‘A resounding achievement…One that will linger with the reader long after its reverberating conclusion.’ Publishers Weekly
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 while furthering the author's exploration of urgent moral and aesthetic questions. Elizabeth Costello, a fictional aging Australian novelist who gained fame for a Ulysses-inspired novel in the 1960s, reveals the workings of her still-formidable mind in a series of formal addresses she either attends or delivers herself (an award acceptance speech, a lecture on a cruise ship, a graduation speech). This ingenious structure allows Coetzee to circle around his protagonist, revealing her preoccupations and contradictions her relationships with her son, John, an academic, and her sister, Blanche, a missionary in Africa; her deep, almost fanatical concern with animal rights; her conflicted views on reason and realism; her grapplings with the human problems of sex and spirituality. The specters of the Holocaust and colonialism, of Greek mythology and Christian morality, and of Franz Kafka and the absurd haunt the novel, as Coetzee deftly weaves the intense contemplation of abstractions with the everyday life of an all-too-human body and mind. The struggle for self-expression comes to a wrenching climax when Elizabeth faces a final reckoning and finds herself at a loss for words. This is a novel of weighty ideas, concerned with what it means to be human and with the difficult and seductive task of making meaning. It is a resounding achievement by Coetzee and one that will linger with the reader long after its reverberating conclusion.
