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Elizabeth Costello is a 2003 novel by South African-born Nobel
Laureate J. M.
Coetzee.
In this novel, Elizabeth Costello, an 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 pieces that
Coetzee previously published. 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.
Background
fiction
The penultimate chapter, "At the Gate", is an overt reworking of
several of Franz
Kafka's stories and novels, principally "Before the Law"
and The Trial.
The last chapter consists of a letter from Lady Chandos to Francis Bacon. This
is a fictitious intertext to the well-known Lord Chandos Letter by Hugo
von Hofmannsthal (1902). The Chandos Letter, in which
the narrator, Philip Lord Chandos, laments that language has begun
to fail his need for self-expression, is often cited as a key text
of literary modernism. Coetzee's fabrication of Lady Chandos's
letter replicates what in the novel Elizabeth Costello herself is
presented having done, namely adding a female voice (that of Molly
Bloom) to a canonical modernist work (Ulysses).
Awards
Reviews
External
links
| Works by J. M.
Coetzee |
|
| Novels |
|
 |
|
| Memoirs |
Boyhood: Scenes from Provincial
Life (1997) · Youth: Scenes from Provincial Life
II (2002) · Summertime (2009)
|
|
| Essay collections |
White Writing: On the Culture of
Letters in South Africa (1988) · Doubling the Point: Essays and
Interviews (1992) · Giving Offense: Essays on
Censorship (1996) · The Lives of Animals
(1999) · Stranger Shores: Literary Essays,
1986–1999 (2001) · Inner Workings: Literary Essays,
2000-2005 (2007)
|
|
| Film adaptations |
|
|
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