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A review by apawney97
Elizabeth Costello by J.M. Coetzee
4.0
I have only one question when it comes to this book: What does it NOT tackle? In the brevity of approximately 200 pages, Coetzee is able to refer to the following:
-- ethical treatment of animals and humans with reference to the Holocaust
-- war and post-war trauma
-- the issue of ethnicity, blackness, and black literature
-- the author's battle with his text in order to remain 'alive', not letting it sublimate him
-- questions regarding canonicity
-- the anxiety of influence
-- a plethora of intertextual relations from Woolf to Kafka to Joyce
-- family relationships, love, sexuality
-- the effect of time on the individual, both on the mortal and the psychological planes
and many others...
And all of these factors are seamlessly integrated within the text without forgetting the main narrative. Instead, these factors serve the narrative in order to supplement it further. My first Coetzee and it will surely not be the last!
-- ethical treatment of animals and humans with reference to the Holocaust
-- war and post-war trauma
-- the issue of ethnicity, blackness, and black literature
-- the author's battle with his text in order to remain 'alive', not letting it sublimate him
-- questions regarding canonicity
-- the anxiety of influence
-- a plethora of intertextual relations from Woolf to Kafka to Joyce
-- family relationships, love, sexuality
-- the effect of time on the individual, both on the mortal and the psychological planes
and many others...
And all of these factors are seamlessly integrated within the text without forgetting the main narrative. Instead, these factors serve the narrative in order to supplement it further. My first Coetzee and it will surely not be the last!