Customer Reviews

Elizabeth Costello

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2 star:		(7)
1 star:		(12)

 

 

Directly upon finishing Elizabeth Costello, I was ready to concede that I didn't know what the heck I had just read. The book had a tangible emotional impact on me, but I was at a loss to explain what Coetzee was after, what his meaning was. I was at the point of assigning this to the pile of the unfathomable, but there was one thing I wished to pursue first. This pursuit, which cost me a mere couple of hours, retrieved the book for me and provided a structure and meaning that I had initially missed. (More below.)

Most of the chapters (or lessons, as outlined in the table of contents) in Elizabeth Costello have been published elsewhere between 1997 and 2002. As a whole they present a series of lectures that fictional fiction writer Elizabeth Costello attends or delivers. These lectures are tied together minimally with some descriptions of her family and some dialog between characters. The final lesson, "At the Gate", is a dream-like sequence in which Costello is somehow being judged and is required to explain her beliefs. The book ends with an excerpt form Hugo von Hofmannsthal's short work Letter of Lord Chandos to Lord Bacon (1902). A postscript follows, which is Coetzee's addition to Hofmannsthahal's work: a supplementary letter from Lord Chandos' wife Elizabeth (Elizabeth C.!) to Bacon.

The first seven lessons had some sort of unity. They were, after all, lectures that somehow included Elizabeth Costello. Okay. But with the addition of the ethereal lesson "At the Gate" and the timetwisting inclusion of Hofmannsthal, Chandos, and his wife, I knew that Coetzee was after something much more complex.

The bit of homework I did before giving up on the book was to retrieve Hofmannstahl's work (available easily enough on the web). This "letter," which is about six pages long was eye-opening. Here was the theme of Elizabeth Costello spelled out. Here is a writer apologizing for his "complete abandonment of literary activity," despondent and feeble, capable of being driven to despair by the thought of rats being poisoned or the death of an eel. In the letter (and in Coetzee's excerpt), Chandos talks of how things - tangible things - are all that can provide meaning and, to his wife, "rapture." Chandos and Elizabeth Costello (in lesson 8) both talk about "thinking with the heart." Chandos says "To me, then, it is as though my body consists of nought but ciphers which give me the key to everything; or as if we could enter into a new and hopeful relationship with the whole structure of existence if only we begin to think with the heart."

(An aside: having recently read A.S. Byatt's The Biographer's Tale, I am struck by the similar theme of writers losing the ability to be sustained by words and images, needing instead things.)

What finally tied lesson 8 to the rest of the work for me, and created a "Eureka!" moment, was a line near the end of Chandos letter, when talking of the inadequacy of Latin, English, Spanish and Italian to write or think, he speaks of a "language none of whose words is known to me, a language in which inanimate things speak to me and wherein I may ONE DAY HAVE TO JUSTIFY MYSELF BEFORE AN UNKNOWN JUDGE." [emphasis added]

Having read Hofmannsthal's work, I now had a resource for interpreting Costello better than I had initially. I am always happy to find literature that delivers some depth of understanding, and invariably these works require some work on my part. There is a direct correspondence between what I am willing to do and what the work is willing to give up. Elizabeth Costello is one of those works. As far as I am concerned, I have much work to still do.

This is a novel of ideas, profound ideas, written by someone who is not just a great author but also a great thinker. Coetzee has found a way to wrap a great many conceptual and philosophical arguments into a novel of the sparest proportions in terms of plot, character, and prose. There really is no plot to this book, and only one main character. It is as if Coetzee did not want the traditional elements of the novel to stand in the way of his greater purpose in this work. Amazingly, Elizabeth Costello is still very readable, a testament to the author's skill and grace.

This is certainly the most introspective of Coetzee's novels. His main character, Elizabeth Costello, is an aging Australian novelist of international acclaim, and she certainly resembles the author in many ways. Coetzee uses her as a vessel through which he wrestles with some of the more difficult questions out there. Do humans bear a higher responsibility towards the protection and humane treatment of animals? Are there topics so ugly and dark that writers have a moral obligation to stay away from them? What is the nature of salvation? These are the weighty issues that Coetzee takes on here.

What is truly impressive is his ability to argue both sides of these questions in a remarkably coherent and convincing fashion. At first one naturally assumes that the opinions expressed by the main character are also those of the author. However, the novel's minor characters, whose primary purpose is to rebut Elizabeth's arguments, are at times more convincing than Elizabeth herself, who often takes extreme positions that are difficult to defend. In this way, the reader is not so much lectured to, which would be tedious, but rather asked to think deeply about these important questions. Coetzee clearly has his statements to make, but he does so with a subtlety that may escape the casual reader.

This book, while not as good as his masterful Booker Prize-winner Disgrace, is certainly representative of a Nobel laureate at the top of his intellectual game.

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?

This is an unusual but immensely satisfying book which sees Coetzee combining the two aspects of his literary personality - prize-winning novelist and eminent scholar - in ways that will challenge some readers' preconceptions about the relationship between imaginative and critical writing. Many have ridiculed this book for being ostensibly a pastiche of previously published pieces, torn from their contexts and offered as a unified set of "lessons" which we're supposed to accept as a "novel". The very first lesson, "Realism", with its deliberate foregrounding of the artificiality of fiction, works as an elaborate justification for what follows: "stories" populated with "characters" who sometimes seem scarcely more then puppets through which Coetzee ventriloquises philosophical points. Yet this artificiality, I think, is in itself part of the point of a novel which discusses (among other things) the role of the contemporary writer and his or her work. It deals with a matrix of ethical, cultural and theoretical issues which have been preoccupying literary critics and scholars in recent decades - the morality of creative works and the collision (or blurred intersection) of religion and humanism as they grapple with evil, eros, death and what it means to be human. Ironically or not, Coetzee's "stories" - especially "The Humanities in Africa" - benefit immensely from the opening expose of realism: it reminds you that authorial choices are constantly being made, and allows you to appreciate the ones Coetzee ultimately makes. It's almost as if he has stripped off the surface layer of a realist novel and shown us what is really going on underneath. I enjoyed that and, in some ways, found it more honest than a wholly, unselfconsciously realist account of the same experiences would have been. Is Elizabeth Costello simply Coetzee, transposed from one Antipodean home to another? Of course she is - but only to the extent that most of her intellectual combatants are other facets of Coetzee, too; which is to say they represent other positions which any intelligent, thoughtful human in an outpost of Europe could just as happily occupy. But Coetzee is there, physically, too, I think. Who else could that tall, dark and bearded man who keeps popping up now and again possibly be?

J.M. Coetzee won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2003, and has won the Booker Prize twice, most recently in 1999 for 'Disgrace', a stark and disturbing novel about a South African university professor who finds himself at the centre of a horrifying set of events - ie. getting fired from his job after an affair with a student, witnessing his daughter's gang-rape. . . It is fair to say that 'Disgrace' doesn't pull too many punches.

'Elizabeth Costello' is less harrowing, but no less thought-provoking, and explores similar themes to that novel - redemption, travel, the human condition etc. through the life of the eponymous main character, an Australian writer, who finds her own life thrown into turmoil.

Where there are some works which might make you want to give up on life altogether, and live on a South Sea Island in a state of narcotic bliss ('The Lotos Eaters' by Alfred, Lord Tennyson, springs to mind), this is a book that is similarly anti-aspirational. A kind of antidote to all those self-help books out there, this is not written to cure anybody's crippling depression, and might be best avoided by those who are feeling life is getting them down.

I couldn't recommend this to absolutely anybody, any more than I could 'Disgrace', and while the nihilism of 'Costello' is almost unbearably bleak at times, it is a powerful work, and rightly acknowledged as perhaps the greatest work Coetzee has produced so far.

Elizabeth Costello isn't really a novel. It is a thought-provoking collection of essays disguised as a novel. In that same way, this novel isn't really 'about' a fictional character named Elizabeth Costello, it's about J.M. Coetzee himself. Coetzee uses the fictional construct of the Costello character to convey these essays--and in some instances uses other characters to criticize these essays. It's a very interesting approach and it works--which I think says a lot for Coetzee's talents. My favorite chapter is the last one, where Costello thinks she has died, and death becomes almost Kafkaesque. Costello is annoyed. She dislikes Kafka--her experiences in this 'afterlife' are at once brilliant and very funny. If you are in the mood for an intellectual challenge, and don't feel the need for a plot, Elizabeth Costello will suit your needs.

Like Elizabeth Costello, the title character of this novel, J.M. Coetzee is himself a noted literary figure. As a matter of fact this South African writer has recently won a Nobel prize. In this book, he takes the opportunity to discuss a wide variety of moral and ethical concerns through the voice of his main character, Elizabeth Costello, an aging Australian novelist who is called upon again and again to give lectures on the literary circuit.

We meet her first on a American college campus, her son there in an effort to assist her. And when her lecture, which turns out to be a rambling discussion of Kafka, is not well received, he has his own little adventure. We meet him again later when she stays in his home in Boston to give yet another lecture. This time she goes off on a tangent about animal rights, making the day uncomfortable for John and his wife. Later, she's off to a cruise ship where she finds herself giving a lecture along with an ex-lover of hers. And still later, she goes to Africa where her sister is a nun. We see her in Amsterdam considering the nature of evil. We learn some of her erotic recollections. And always we see her approaching the end of her life.

The book started slowly and I found some of her early lectures boring, especially since I didn't know some of her literary references. But as it continued, I enjoyed some of her discussions. J.M. Coetzee is a fine writer with a vast command of language. I found my mind stimulated and started to look at some basic concepts with fresh eyes. Her character was developed perfectly and, in some ways, I even identified with this old woman.

This is a good piece of literature that provokes quite a bit of food for thought. For that reason I recommend it even though I know I absorbed just a small part of it. But that part was certainly worthwhile.



.

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.

"There is first of all the problem of the opening, namely, how to get us from where we are, which is, as yet, nowhere, to the far bank. It is a simple bridging problem, a problem of knocking together a bridge."

In J. M. Coetzee's new novel, ELIZABETH COSTELLO, these first sentences greet the reader as a comment on first sentences, a self-conscious opening that makes clear the novelist's job: to bridge the gap between reality, "which is, as yet, nowhere," and fiction, "the far bank."

Before leading us into "the far territory, which is where we want to be," he introduces us to his title character: "Elizabeth Costello is a writer, born in 1928. She has written nine novels, two books of poems, a book on bird life, and a body of journalism. By birth she is Australian. Elizabeth Costello made her name with her fourth novel, THE HOUSE ON ECCLES STREET (1969), whose main character is Marion Bloom, wife of Leopold Bloom, principal character of another novel, ULYSSES (1922), by James Joyce."

Literature and the lives of writers are just two of the freighted topics Coetzee, winner of the 2003 Nobel Prize for Literature, expounds upon through his title character. Structured as a series of lectures Costello delivers around the world, this novel of ideas addresses the nature of realism, the rights of animals, and the problem of evil.

ELIZABETH COSTELLO is never showy; rather, the emphasis is on quiet technique-subtle, focused metafiction. It is a novel that looks for its own logic, and Coetzee locates it in ideas and arguments, the presentation, discussion and repudiation of which structure the novel vibrantly and rationally.

Each section explores various approaches to the essence of writing. In the opener, entitled "Realism," Costello delivers a public lecture arguing that ideas presented through fiction cannot be autonomous, but must be anchored in objects and given voice by characters. As the chapter unfolds, Coetzee heeds this argument, setting up a trio of characters --- Costello, her son John, and an academic named Susan Moebius --- who throughout the chapter will voice different ideas that will control their own actions and responses toward each other.

At another event Costello talks about the "willed ignorance" of an entire generation of Germans prior to and during World War II --- people who were aware of the concentration camps but convinced themselves and the world that they didn't know what evils lurked so close. She uses this as a metaphor for the mass slaughter of animals in farms and abattoirs, a comparison many in her audience find condemnable. Furthermore, if we cannot grasp such large numbers of victims --- if, as she herself states, we "cannot count to a million deaths" --- how can we count to a million passive sinners who are allowing such exploitive animal massacre to take place?

The point is that Costello's ideas are not always sound --- her lectures are never very well received and her ideas are met with scorn and disregard. Even she doubts her own arguments and questions their logic. She agonizes in "The Problem of Evil" over whether to lecture on literature "as a form of moral adventurousness, [which] has the potential to be dangerous." Feeling it is her job as a writer to present the undecorated truth, she goes ahead with her talk, only to realize immediately the critical flaw in her argument.

In other words, in her old age and out-of-step extremism, Costello is prone to self-doubt and self-incrimination; she argues most with herself and is her own most belligerent critic. But the unreliability of her logic does not weaken the book, but strengthens it by anchoring the arguments in her vulnerable character.

What seems to be missing from ELIZABETH COSTELLO is her fiction, surely an intended omission. That she does not read from any of her novels at these lectures is telling: her oeuvre is the god off-screen, never glimpsed but exerting a mighty influence. This gaping absence makes these episodes all the more theoretical in nature, but it also implies that contemporary writers --- in fact, all writers --- bear a public responsibility that transcends bestseller lists and book signings. They have a duty to traffic in ideas and promote free thought, and whether they are wrong or right matters very little. In Coetzee's view, a writer's most important tasks are to make us reconsider our own intensely guarded ideas, if only briefly, and to allow us to empathize with other humans.

"There is no limit to the extent to which we can think ourselves into the being of another," Coetzee reminds us. "There are no bounds to the sympathetic imagination."

--- Reviewed by Stephen M. Deusner

I honestly don't know. The press releases say Elizabeth Costello is a novel that pretends to be a biography, but many critics swear it's Coetzee's biography dressed up as fiction, even tho the protagonist is female while the author, of course, is a man. All I know is that it's a damn fine piece of writing.
The setup is that Elizabeth Costelly, an Australian writer whose fame is based on an early piece of work about Ulysses' character, Molly Bloom, cleverly educates us to issues of race, honesty, humanitarianism, and deception in Africa through "eight lessons" which sometimes read like lectures or debates.
It's not an easy book, and Coetzee's bleak outlook comes through in the writing, but it's worth the effort. It's a book I'll keep, as I believe I'll get even more out of it on a second reading.