Elizabeth Costello : eight lessons

Despite her fame, a celebrated author continues the struggle to articulate her vision, in J.M. Coetzee’s exploration of the creative mind.Elizabeth Costello is an Australian writer of international renown. Famous principally for an early novel that established her reputation, she has reached the stage where her remaining function is to be venerated and applauded. Her life has become a series of engagements in sterile conference rooms throughout the world - a private consciousness obliged to reveal itself to a curious public. She has made her life's work the study of other people - yet now it is she who is the object of scrutiny."The book has a shape, rather a religious one: it inclines towards death. (...) Against all likelihood, the book is more affecting than anything else he has written, and, I think, deeply confessional. (...) Coetzee's recourse to Elizabeth Costello, and to fiction over traditional argumentation, is a way of saying that the only means of arguing for the literary -- for feeling over reason, imagination over thought -- is via the literary. Literary argumentation must take literary form. But this, in turn, means that ideas cannot be won, that they are vulnerable." - James Wood, London Review of BooksJ. M. Coetzee is a multi-award-winning author and was awarded the 2003 Nobel Prize in Literature. His works of fiction include Dusklands; Waiting for the Barbarians, which won South Africa’s highest literary honour, the Central News Agency Literary Award; and Life & Times of Michael K., for which Coetzee was awarded his first Booker Prize in 1983. He has also published a memoir, Boyhood: Scenes from a Provincial Life, and several essay collections. Elizabeth Costellois a humane, moral, and uncompromising creation. The subject of J.M. Coetzee's latest work of fiction is an Australian writer of international renown -- feted, studied and honoured. Famous principally for an early novel that established her reputation and from which, it seems, she will never escape, she has reached the stage, late in life, where her remaining function is to be venerated and applauded. One of a new breed of intellectual nomads, her life has become a series of engagements in sterile conference rooms throughout the world -- a private consciousness obliged to reveal itself to a curious public: the presentation of a major award at an American college where she is required to deliver a lecture; a sojourn as the writer-in-residence on a cruise liner during which she encounters a fellow guest lecturer, an African poet also employed to divert the passengers. Then there is a disquieting appearance at a writers' conference in Amsterdam where she finds the subject of her talk unexpectedly among the audience. She has made her life's work the study of other people, yet now it is she who is the object of scrutiny. But, for her, what matters is the continuing search for a means of articulating her vision and the verdict of future generations. J.M. Coetzee's latest work of fiction offers us a profound and delicate vision of literary celebrity, artistry and the private life of the mind. Elizabeth Costello is a distinguished and aging Australian novelist whose life is revealed through a series of eight formal addresses. From an award-acceptance speech at a New England liberal arts college to a lecture on evil in Amsterdam and a sexually charged reading by the poet Robert Duncan, the author draws the reader toward its astonishing conclusion. The novel is, on its surface, the story of a woman's life as mother, sister, lover, and writer. Yet it is also a profound and haunting meditation on the nature of storytelling. "Elizabeth Costello is a distinguished and aging Australian novelist whose life is revealed through a series of eight formal addresses. From an award-acceptance speech at a New England liberal arts college to a lecture on evil in Amsterdam and a sexually charged reading by the poet Robert Duncan, Coetzee draws the reader inexorably toward its conclusion."--Jacket