For South African writer J.M. Coetzee, winner of two Booker Prizes and the 2003 Nobel Prize for Literature, the world of receiving literary awards and giving speeches must be such a commonplace that he has put the circuit at the center of his book, Elizabeth Costello. As the work opens, in fact, the eponymous Elizabeth, a fictional novelist, is in Williamstown, Pennsylvania, to receive the Stowe Award. For her speech at the Williamstown's Altona College she chooses the tired topic, "What Is Realism?" and quickly loses her audience in her unfocused discussion of Kafka. From there, readers follow her to a cruise ship where she is virtually imprisoned as a celebrity lecturer to the ship's guests. Next, she is off to Appleton College where she delivers the annual Gates Lecture. Later, she will even attend a graduation speech.

Coetzee has made this project difficult for himself. Occasional writing--writing that includes graduation speeches, acceptance speeches, or even academic lectures--is a less than auspicious form around which to build a long work of fiction. A powerful central character engaged in a challenging stage of life might sustain such a work. Yet, at the start, Coetzee declares that Elizabeth is "old and tired," and her best book, The House on Eccles Street is long in her past. Elizabeth Costello lacks a progressive plot and offers little development over the course of each new performance at the lectern. Readers are given Elizabeth fully formed with only brief glimpses of her past sexual dalliances and literary efforts.

In the end, Elizabeth Costello seems undecided about its own direction. When Elizabeth is brought to a final reckoning at the gates of the afterlife, she begins to suspect that she is actually in hell, "or at least purgatory: a purgatory of clichés." Perhaps Coetzee's Elizabeth Costello, which can be read as an extended critique of clichéd writing, is a portrait of this purgatory. While some readers may find Coetzee's philosophical prose sustenance enough on the journey, some will turn back at the gate. --Patrick O'Kelley

From Publishers Weekly
Even more uncompromising than usual, this latest novel by Coetzee (his first since 1999's Booker Prize-winning Disgrace) blurs the bounds of fiction and nonfiction while furthering the author's exploration of urgent moral and aesthetic questions. Elizabeth Costello, a fictional aging Australian novelist who gained fame for a Ulysses-inspired novel in the 1960s, reveals the workings of her still-formidable mind in a series of formal addresses she either attends or delivers herself (an award acceptance speech, a lecture on a cruise ship, a graduation speech). This ingenious structure allows Coetzee to circle around his protagonist, revealing her preoccupations and contradictions her relationships with her son, John, an academic, and her sister, Blanche, a missionary in Africa; her deep, almost fanatical concern with animal rights; her conflicted views on reason and realism; her grapplings with the human problems of sex and spirituality. The specters of the Holocaust and colonialism, of Greek mythology and Christian morality, and of Franz Kafka and the absurd haunt the novel, as Coetzee deftly weaves the intense contemplation of abstractions with the everyday life of an all-too-human body and mind. The struggle for self-expression comes to a wrenching climax when Elizabeth faces a final reckoning and finds herself at a loss for words. This is a novel of weighty ideas, concerned with what it means to be human and with the difficult and seductive task of making meaning. It is a resounding achievement by Coetzee and one that will linger with the reader long after its reverberating conclusion.Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist
Although it's billed as "a novel masquerading as a biography," some readers may speculate that Coetzee's newest is a biography posing as a novel, or even lectures formed into fiction (six portions were previously published separately). The format is instantly intriguing. Elizabeth Costello is a near-elderly Australian novelist who remains best known for an early work in which she appropriates James Joyce's Ulysses character, Molly Bloom. Coetzee tackles problems of writing, literature, philosophy, and family through eight "lessons," most of which center on a lengthy formal address. In "Realism," Costello travels to Pennsylvania with her son to receive an award; Coetzee slyly enumerates conventions of realistic storytelling even as he guides Costello through interview, debate, and a lecture in which she declares, "The word-mirror is broken, irreparably." In "The Novel in Africa," Costello lectures on a cruise ship with an old acquaintance, Emmanuel Egudu, a Nigerian expatriate novelist. Egudu's talk takes center stage, even as Costello demands to know why there is "no African novel worth speaking of." In later "lessons," Costello speaks passionately about animal rights; hears her sister, a nun, deride the humanities; and gives a speech she is not sure she believes, claiming writers who explore evil may not survive uncontaminated. Coetzee may be exploding the genre, but Elizabeth Costello has real novelistic force. Our pleasure is watching this fascinating woman wrestle with intellectual issues as if they are life-and-death matters--and being convinced, in the end, that they are. Keir Graff
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

FROM THE PUBLISHER

In 1982, J. M. Coetzee dazzled the literary world with his novel Waiting for the Barbarians. Five novels and two Booker prizes later, Coetzee is a writer of international stature. Now, in his first work of fiction since the New York Times bestselling Disgrace, he has crafted an unusual and deeply affecting tale. Elizabeth Costello is a distinguished and aging Australian novelist whose life is revealed through an ingenious 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 astonishing conclusion. Vividly imagined and masterfully wrought in unerring prose, Elizabeth Costello 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 that only a writer of Coetzee's caliber could accomplish.

FROM THE CRITICS

The New York Times

In his first work of fiction since Disgrace, Mr. Coetzee creates a formidable, even charismatic stand-in: a writer so dedicated to her work that she suggests "one of those large cats that pause as they eviscerate their victim and, across the torn-open belly, give you a cold yellow stare." If she is not precisely lovable, Elizabeth is still admirably fierce. Yet this book delves its way into her deepest doubts, culminating in a theatrical denouement teased out of Elizabeth's own affinity for the Kafkaesque. She is ultimately forced to explain her own writerly principles, including this one: "I believe in what does not bother to believe in me." — Janet Maslin

NY Times Sunday Book Review

Old age offers no comforts, and that, for Coetzee, is its virtue. Costello has a passing but unforgettable encounter with its unpleasantnesses in a ladies' room outside the lecture hall in Amsterdam, where she has gone to hide after her talk has gone badly, as her talks usually do. As she sits on the toilet, this distinguished artist struggling to work through the implications of a code of literary ethics meant to protect the dignity of the powerless and the naked, a child scratches at the door and calls out to her mother in scornful Dutch that there's a woman in there, she can hear her. Costello hurriedly flushes and exits the stall, ''evading the eyes of mother and daughter.'' There is no justice in the ability of youth to shame age, and yet it's a fundamental fact of the embodied life. Coetzee's unflinching exploration of this desolate and strangely beautiful terrain represents the cruelest and best use to which literature can be put. — Judith Shulevitz

The New Yorker

Billed as fiction, this puzzling book by the new Nobel laureate in literature is more nebulously a collection of essays, all but two previously published, embedded within the story of an aging novelist, Elizabeth Costello, as she goes on the lecture circuit. Costello first appeared in Coetzee’s slender 1999 volume “The Lives of Animals,” in which she delivered a college address on animal rights, and that text is reprised here as part of eight “lessons” that she must give or receive, ranging in subject from literary realism to the problem of evil. Coetzee’s work has always been distinguished by cerebral rigor, which in his strongest novels propels narratives of claustrophobic and often savage intimacy. But here he seems to have lost faith in the power of storytelling; his heroine’s journey takes place almost entirely in the realm of the mind, and the effect is that of exploring a cold, depopulated planet.

Publishers Weekly

Even more uncompromising than usual, this latest novel by Coetzee (his first since 1999's Booker Prize-winning Disgrace) blurs the bounds of fiction and nonfiction while furthering the author's exploration of urgent moral and aesthetic questions. Elizabeth Costello, a fictional aging Australian novelist who gained fame for a Ulysses-inspired novel in the 1960s, reveals the workings of her still-formidable mind in a series of formal addresses she either attends or delivers herself (an award acceptance speech, a lecture on a cruise ship, a graduation speech). This ingenious structure allows Coetzee to circle around his protagonist, revealing her preoccupations and contradictions her relationships with her son, John, an academic, and her sister, Blanche, a missionary in Africa; her deep, almost fanatical concern with animal rights; her conflicted views on reason and realism; her grapplings with the human problems of sex and spirituality. The specters of the Holocaust and colonialism, of Greek mythology and Christian morality, and of Franz Kafka and the absurd haunt the novel, as Coetzee deftly weaves the intense contemplation of abstractions with the everyday life of an all-too-human body and mind. The struggle for self-expression comes to a wrenching climax when Elizabeth faces a final reckoning and finds herself at a loss for words. This is a novel of weighty ideas, concerned with what it means to be human and with the difficult and seductive task of making meaning. It is a resounding achievement by Coetzee and one that will linger with the reader long after its reverberating conclusion. (Oct. 20) Forecast: This is not the most accessible of Coetzee's novels, but it is an important addition to the author's body of work and heady reading for those who enjoy novels of ideas. Most of the book's chapters have been published separately, two as part of the nonfiction volume The Lives of Animals (Princeton, 1999). Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.

Library Journal