Customer Reviews

Elizabeth Costello

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This is such a tricky book that short reviews can't really capture it, even if the premise is simple: Elizabeth Costello goes around the world on the celebrity-writer circuit delivering lectures. Poorly. Those lectures are not cryptic but they are challenging and frequently original; the stories around the lectures are well-observed and clever; and it ends with a series of surprises.

It is not a coincidence that Ulysses is evoked on the first page. Give it a chance: Elizabeth Costello will actually become more and more interesting, and the puzzles, the tricks, the insinuations of the novel build up around those lectures - however poorly they are delivered.

I really expected more from Coetzee, whom I had never read before picking up this book. I saw after finishing the book that it was originally published as separate stories or vignettes, and I'm not surprised. The title character spends all of her time giving speeches, which is strange for a novel--you think you will get a plot, but you just get lectured to. The writing is good, spare and cogent, but the book does not hang together well enough to be a novel, in my opinion. The best chapter, which is the last, has little or nothing to do with the prior chapters.