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A review by jordbord
Elizabeth Costello by J.M. Coetzee
5.0
This is one of the best pieces of fiction I've read. Dizzying, disturbing, and yet somehow life-affirming and - there's really no other word - almost spiritual as a reading experience, this story forcefully shook my ideas and brought up a welling of compassion, not only for the characters (and animals), but for living things outside its pages.
Its chapters are titled 'lessons', but the book does not read like a sermon so much as an extended Socratic-dialogue embedded into fiction. Each so-called lesson is in reality a set-piece in the life of the protagonist, Elizabeth Costello, an elderly novelist, highly celebrated for work she did long before but feels she can't reproduce. There is too much prolonged argumentation about ideas for this to be a novel in the tradition of Tolstoy and Dickens and Austen and Proust and Joyce, and in fact, the book is always sacrificing a touch of immersion to deal with its subject-matter; but this I do not find a problem at all. David Foster Wallace, in his essay on Dostoevsky lamented the dwindling of real philosophical fiction, attributing the fact to irony-culture and corrosive postmodernism shticks in vogue in writing. I wonder if he read this book before he died. The novel is subtle and understated in its principles, but it is certainly not ironic - though it has flashes of wit - and, while Coetzee bows to Barthes, and unveils himself as writer in the first chapter, deprecating his own story-telling, the emotional and moral import that follows does not lose out from self-awareness, and thankfully Coetzee stops interrupting after the first time.
That Coetzee puts himself voluntarily on the chopping-block of the capital 'a' author (authority, what terrible etymology!), and that this does not limit him from working his subsequent magic, is just proof how good he is. The prose oozes style - lyrical Coetzee has been called, with which I agree (as with any good writer he presses his habits on you irresistibly, like he's yawning and you then yawn back). Here's a snippet of nice little descriptive imagery conjuring up ancient Greece (cliched on-purpose, but pretty), 'Hellas: half-naked men, their breasts gleaming with olive oil, sitting on the temple steps discoursing about the good and the true, while in the background lithe-limbed boys wrestle and a herd of goats contentedly grazes.' The dialogue is snappy, though I say again, improbable in its length because of the book's emphasis on teasing complex, profound truths out of contemporary life. But to detractors of this I would say, what's good enough for Dostoevsky, Oscar Wilde, and Aldous Huxley, is good enough for us. The narrative-style is silky and, finally, quite beautiful to observe, so smoothly does it bound forward between scenes, like a rabbit taking running leaps along a forest path. Some writers are demanding on their readers, but to his great credit, Coetzee wants you to keep up with him all the time.
Each discussion (lesson) takes place with Elizabeth as a focal point, with her presenting a thesis to an audience at a literary conference, meanwhile as forcefully arguing with herself whether she is correct. Elizabeth doesn't trust herself. She doesn't trust reason anymore, and the great irony of the narrative is that she still uses reason to try to understand her mind nonetheless, and to pry apart the difficult questions - have I lived a moral life? Should I have had more fun? Should I have written about other people more often, not myself? Agitated for causes? And what about my family? and so forth. Elizabeth, on the death-knell of her short life, instead of savoring every remaining moment, drifts into sink-holes of rumination and agonizes over things she isn't able to grasp until entering the grave.
I don't want to interpret the 'message' like so many reviewers will do when they read something, first of all because I think this is an incredibly smart book and that that is no straightforward task, but more importantly because 'Elizabeth Costello' is not, in my opinion, a book for consensus. I don't think this book comes to a great, fanfare conclusion about, for instance, whether the Hellenic or Judeo-Christian philosophic vision is superior for achieving the good-life (or for the good-enough-life), or whether poetry can offer us a better approach to animal rights than the cutting-edge of modern philosophy. What it does do is, like its prose, whittle all the excesses and superfluities away till you feel like what is essentially important is laid bare, like you have been shown where the fault-lines, the embattled trenches of these debates are located.
If I were to venture, my personal opinion, which needs to be revised by a second, and third, and fourth reading, is that this novel does not offer us any bandaging to the void of meaning that engulfed us when Nietzche and Darwin pronounced God dead, it really reminds us of something located in the heart, not intellect: compassion. Compassion for ourselves, and 'others' - all the beings we vehemently disagree with or personally dislike or fail to understand, around us. Argumentation, violence is getting old-fashioned. Somewhere in this book it says something like, 'Discussion can only be had where there is shared ground,' and I cannot think what better ground there is to share between living creatures than good-will. Love is an inarguable thing, it cannot be stitched together from fragments, or 'unpacked' into various ideas: you either choose to nurture it and to feel it or you don't. You cannot demonstrate love with a mathematical proof, or a set of premises in a treatise, though zealous philosophers or materialist scientists may urge you to believe otherwise.
If anyone has gotten this far into a very un-substantive review, thank you, but I urge you to glean substance yourself by going and reading this excellent and thoughtful book, which will endure a long time if it stirs other readers as much as it did me. Now I'm going to go cry on my bed next to a tissue-box, and watch a film...
Its chapters are titled 'lessons', but the book does not read like a sermon so much as an extended Socratic-dialogue embedded into fiction. Each so-called lesson is in reality a set-piece in the life of the protagonist, Elizabeth Costello, an elderly novelist, highly celebrated for work she did long before but feels she can't reproduce. There is too much prolonged argumentation about ideas for this to be a novel in the tradition of Tolstoy and Dickens and Austen and Proust and Joyce, and in fact, the book is always sacrificing a touch of immersion to deal with its subject-matter; but this I do not find a problem at all. David Foster Wallace, in his essay on Dostoevsky lamented the dwindling of real philosophical fiction, attributing the fact to irony-culture and corrosive postmodernism shticks in vogue in writing. I wonder if he read this book before he died. The novel is subtle and understated in its principles, but it is certainly not ironic - though it has flashes of wit - and, while Coetzee bows to Barthes, and unveils himself as writer in the first chapter, deprecating his own story-telling, the emotional and moral import that follows does not lose out from self-awareness, and thankfully Coetzee stops interrupting after the first time.
That Coetzee puts himself voluntarily on the chopping-block of the capital 'a' author (authority, what terrible etymology!), and that this does not limit him from working his subsequent magic, is just proof how good he is. The prose oozes style - lyrical Coetzee has been called, with which I agree (as with any good writer he presses his habits on you irresistibly, like he's yawning and you then yawn back). Here's a snippet of nice little descriptive imagery conjuring up ancient Greece (cliched on-purpose, but pretty), 'Hellas: half-naked men, their breasts gleaming with olive oil, sitting on the temple steps discoursing about the good and the true, while in the background lithe-limbed boys wrestle and a herd of goats contentedly grazes.' The dialogue is snappy, though I say again, improbable in its length because of the book's emphasis on teasing complex, profound truths out of contemporary life. But to detractors of this I would say, what's good enough for Dostoevsky, Oscar Wilde, and Aldous Huxley, is good enough for us. The narrative-style is silky and, finally, quite beautiful to observe, so smoothly does it bound forward between scenes, like a rabbit taking running leaps along a forest path. Some writers are demanding on their readers, but to his great credit, Coetzee wants you to keep up with him all the time.
Each discussion (lesson) takes place with Elizabeth as a focal point, with her presenting a thesis to an audience at a literary conference, meanwhile as forcefully arguing with herself whether she is correct. Elizabeth doesn't trust herself. She doesn't trust reason anymore, and the great irony of the narrative is that she still uses reason to try to understand her mind nonetheless, and to pry apart the difficult questions - have I lived a moral life? Should I have had more fun? Should I have written about other people more often, not myself? Agitated for causes? And what about my family? and so forth. Elizabeth, on the death-knell of her short life, instead of savoring every remaining moment, drifts into sink-holes of rumination and agonizes over things she isn't able to grasp until entering the grave.
I don't want to interpret the 'message' like so many reviewers will do when they read something, first of all because I think this is an incredibly smart book and that that is no straightforward task, but more importantly because 'Elizabeth Costello' is not, in my opinion, a book for consensus. I don't think this book comes to a great, fanfare conclusion about, for instance, whether the Hellenic or Judeo-Christian philosophic vision is superior for achieving the good-life (or for the good-enough-life), or whether poetry can offer us a better approach to animal rights than the cutting-edge of modern philosophy. What it does do is, like its prose, whittle all the excesses and superfluities away till you feel like what is essentially important is laid bare, like you have been shown where the fault-lines, the embattled trenches of these debates are located.
If I were to venture, my personal opinion, which needs to be revised by a second, and third, and fourth reading, is that this novel does not offer us any bandaging to the void of meaning that engulfed us when Nietzche and Darwin pronounced God dead, it really reminds us of something located in the heart, not intellect: compassion. Compassion for ourselves, and 'others' - all the beings we vehemently disagree with or personally dislike or fail to understand, around us. Argumentation, violence is getting old-fashioned. Somewhere in this book it says something like, 'Discussion can only be had where there is shared ground,' and I cannot think what better ground there is to share between living creatures than good-will. Love is an inarguable thing, it cannot be stitched together from fragments, or 'unpacked' into various ideas: you either choose to nurture it and to feel it or you don't. You cannot demonstrate love with a mathematical proof, or a set of premises in a treatise, though zealous philosophers or materialist scientists may urge you to believe otherwise.
If anyone has gotten this far into a very un-substantive review, thank you, but I urge you to glean substance yourself by going and reading this excellent and thoughtful book, which will endure a long time if it stirs other readers as much as it did me. Now I'm going to go cry on my bed next to a tissue-box, and watch a film...