Elizabeth Costello
Elizabeth Costello
J.M. Coetzee
Penguin Books, 2003
ISBN 0-14-200481-2
Amazon Link
I love this book, but I don't think it's for just anyone. It's a book only an English major could love. More literary theory than novel, I actually read it with a pen in my hand to make notations in the margins. I fell out of that habit not long after I finished graduate school, but this is a book to make you feel like you are back in school. Still, as literary theory, it was a brilliant stroke to put it in the form of a novel and really personalize, and by so doing complicate, the thoughts expressed.
Elizabeth Costello is a novelist, and the book is structured around a series of public lectures in which she usually manages to say anything but what her hosts are hoping to hear. Mostly her talks center around belief, loss of belief, ambiguity of belief, complications of belief, ethics of belief and so forth. In a talk on realism, she says, "There used to be a time, we believe, when we could say who we were. Now we are just performers speaking our parts. The bottom has dropped out. We could think this a tragic turn of events, were it not that it is hard to have respect for whatever was the bottom that dropped out--it looks like illusion to us now."
These concepts of truth and illusion as well as questions of good and evil run throughout the book, no matter what the subject. Elizabeth Costello is a woman of staunch opinions but no real belief. At least she believes she has no belief, and everything she does believe falls apart upon examination, though this does little to change her opinions.
All of this ambiguity of belief as related to opinion, action, good, evil, family, eating habits and literature culminates in a very Kafkaesque chapter that, quite frankly, I'm not sure what to make of. Sure, the English major allegorical readings are easy enough, but as a reader just reading this book for pleasure, the whole thing leaves me thinking "Hmph. What was that about?" And I'd be disappointed if it were any other way.
I hope someone I know reads this book soon so we can talk about the frogs. If you are a true a bibliophile (and only if), you really have to read this. There's just no choice.
J.M. Coetzee
Penguin Books, 2003
ISBN 0-14-200481-2
Amazon Link
I love this book, but I don't think it's for just anyone. It's a book only an English major could love. More literary theory than novel, I actually read it with a pen in my hand to make notations in the margins. I fell out of that habit not long after I finished graduate school, but this is a book to make you feel like you are back in school. Still, as literary theory, it was a brilliant stroke to put it in the form of a novel and really personalize, and by so doing complicate, the thoughts expressed.
Elizabeth Costello is a novelist, and the book is structured around a series of public lectures in which she usually manages to say anything but what her hosts are hoping to hear. Mostly her talks center around belief, loss of belief, ambiguity of belief, complications of belief, ethics of belief and so forth. In a talk on realism, she says, "There used to be a time, we believe, when we could say who we were. Now we are just performers speaking our parts. The bottom has dropped out. We could think this a tragic turn of events, were it not that it is hard to have respect for whatever was the bottom that dropped out--it looks like illusion to us now."
These concepts of truth and illusion as well as questions of good and evil run throughout the book, no matter what the subject. Elizabeth Costello is a woman of staunch opinions but no real belief. At least she believes she has no belief, and everything she does believe falls apart upon examination, though this does little to change her opinions.
All of this ambiguity of belief as related to opinion, action, good, evil, family, eating habits and literature culminates in a very Kafkaesque chapter that, quite frankly, I'm not sure what to make of. Sure, the English major allegorical readings are easy enough, but as a reader just reading this book for pleasure, the whole thing leaves me thinking "Hmph. What was that about?" And I'd be disappointed if it were any other way.
I hope someone I know reads this book soon so we can talk about the frogs. If you are a true a bibliophile (and only if), you really have to read this. There's just no choice.
posted by Sharon Gerald at 7:11 PM
1 Comments:
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