Elizabeth Costello **

By J.M. Coetzee.
Published 2003 by Viking a Penguin Group,
New York.
230 pages.

Coetzee is one of my favorite authors.  His book Disgrace is one of my favorite books and won the Booker Prize deservedly so I think. While his books always have multiple layers and things to think about, a reader could always count on a riveting narrative.  So I am always recommending his books.  In fact i recommended this book to someone before I had ever read it.  They said they didn't like it.  I was astonished!

So finally this Spring I started to read it.  I immediately started to see the reason my friend did not like the book. Basically its a book of essays.  The book is a novel, but the narrative is basically that of an elderly woman writer who gives 8 speeches.  Each speech is a chapter and supposedly reveals something of the narrative.  And there is a narrative string but it is a really a loose one.  For the most part it is a book of essays with bits of narrative to tie together the essays in a thematic way.  If I had read this as a book of essays my opinion of the book might be different.  The essays/speeches can be very intellectually demanding, yet I was able to comprehend and stay with the strands of thought being presented.  If this book were presented as a book of essays, perhaps the rating would be much higher.

I also see that Coetzee has several books of essays so he might be someone to check out deeper for those who like to read essays.  I guess an interesting idea to pursue here is why he chose to make these essays into a narrative.  He already has published books of essays and some of these "chapters"/ essays had been published in different forms in various magazines.  I'm guessing there was less narrative in those published pieces and those narrative pieces were added when he decided to turn it into a narrative.  Maybe it was an experiment.  Maybe it was a chance for him to try some different ideas for his essays and therefore enable him to distance him self from some of these ideas since the ideas are not really his, but the ideas of his characters.  Maybe it allows him to try on different ideas that normally he wouldn't call his own and that perhaps he disagrees with.  Maybe he's playing devil's advocate here.  Some of the ideas the character has are controversial with in the context of the book and she gets into discussions with people who disagree with her about her speeches.  Maybe its a chance for the author to show both sides of an argument.

The last chapter is interesting and might be the closest to a narrative that there is in this book.  In this chapter, the author is in purgatory and she can't get into heaven because she refuses to commit herself to a "belief".  So she spends her time in Purgatory, a small,  cliched, early 20th century European town, trying to edit her statement about her beliefs.

I enjoyed this book, but i would refrain from recommending it to most people unless I knew that this person really likes to read intellectual and philosophical texts.