03.20.09
Coetzee: Elizabeth Costello
Elizabeth Costello is the first book I’ve read from 2003’s Nobel Laureate for Literature, J.M. Coetzee, whose cultivation as an artist springs from a unique South African and Australian background. So much can be said of this book, but maintaining the informal manner of my pseudo-book reviews, I will be more personal and leave out most of the information that is readily available to us by way of Google.
Do not let the seemingly namby-pamby title fool you. It is a complicated novel that will not fall in the enjoyable category, but would pass as rare and remarkable.The chapters in the table of contents present themselves as “lessons”, and this label is deserved since the novel consists mostly of lectures (which Coetzee delivered prior to this book’s publication) that are successfully interlaced along the fictional life of Elizabeth Costello, an aging and accomplished writer who is in the last and difficult chapters of her life. While most people find the novel’s gist in these ambiguous lectures, I found some of these perplexing and the words and thoughts outside the lectures more notable. The lead character being an award-winning novelist reflects on modes of narration, philosophies, and the writer’s life, but the passage that is imprinted in my mind until now, comes from her son, John: “But you must surely concede that at a certain level we speak, and therefore write, like everyone else. Otherwise we would all be speaking and writing private languages. It is not absurd - is it? - to concern oneself with what people have in common rather than with what sets them apart?”
Another surprising feature of Elizabeth Costello is how the sensual paragraphs advance unexpectedly like a furtive animal. I did not admire these segments but I am amazed at how they were constructed into the novel. Coetzee is an impressive author who presents storytelling adeptly and extraordinarily, and if I did not view stars as a very ridiculous way to evaluate books, Elizabeth Costello would be bequeathed five stars for technique, but only two and a half stars for its sentiments, I’m afraid - from my humble perspective, at least.
“What does evil smell like? Sulphur? Brimstone? Zyklon B? Or has evil become colourless, and odourless, like so much of the rest of the moral world?”
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mika said,
March 21, 2009 at 12:19 pm
But you must surely concede that at a certain level we speak, and therefore write, like everyone else. Otherwise we would all be speaking and writing private languages. It is not absurd - is it? - to concern oneself with what people have in common rather than with what sets them apart?”
- woah! that’s something to ponder over. during the few times i’ve tried to compose music, i would always be fretting that i would sound like this or that composer. i wanted to sound like no one else. but come to think of it, even the greatest composers would write music that sounded like someone else’s music. and perhaps, if it weren’t for a common language in music, there would be no room for individuality. something is individual only in relation to something commonplace. (wahaha, dialectics again! that forms and analysis class has really corrupted me!) :)
Miracle ♪♫ said,
March 25, 2009 at 8:46 am
I’m glad this paragraph from Elizabeth Costello brought you to ponder on these things, Mika. I am always amazed at how you can relate almost everything to music and still make sense. haha =D The forms and analysis class has really corrupted you in the best way possible… that’s why I really don’t mind admitting how I wished to be “corrupted” too. =P