Elizabeth Costello By J.M. Coetzee
Elizabeth Costello By J.M. Coetzee
Softcover
ISBN 0099461927
Publisher: Vintage 2003
Condition: Good. The wraps are slightly shelf rubbed and edge worn. This book was read and enjoyed but is still overall good. Tanning/Browning of pages. The book has no inscriptions and the binding is excellent. The book is protected with a Cellophane cover.
In this novel, Elizabeth Costello, a celebrated aging Australian writer, travels around the world and gives lectures on topics including the lives of animals and literary censorship. In her youth, Costello wrote The House on Eccles Street, a novel that re-tells James Joyce's Ulysses from the perspective of the protagonist's wife, Molly Bloom. Costello, becoming weary from old age, confronts her fame, which seems further and further removed from who she has become, and struggles with issues of belief, vegetarianism, sexuality, language and evil. Many of the lectures Costello gives are edited fragments that Coetzee had previously published. The lessons she delivers only tenuously speak to the work for which she is being honored. Of note, Elizabeth Costello is the main character in Coetzee's academic novel, The Lives of Animals (1999). A character named Elizabeth Costello also appears in Coetzee's 2005 novel Slow Man and Coetzee's 2011 short story Lies is about a woman with the last name Costello.
