=Books recently read=

Elizabeth Costello by J.M. Coetzee.  Elizabeth Costello is a fictional novelist and in this book that bears her name, J.M. Coetzee depicts her in a series of stand-alone set pieces: at seminars and lectures where she presents her views on a variety of topics. It is a device Coetzee uses to clever effect to deliver what one presumes are his own reflections on a wide variety of subjects, including literature and the role of storytelling, the problem of evil, the nature of consciousness, animal rights and the ethics of slaughtering animals for food and scientific experimentation. The narrative is disjointed. In each of the eight sections, Costello appears at various universities around the world, on a cruise ship where she is employed as "cultural" entertainment, as a guest at a reception where her sister—a nun--is receiving an honorary university degree, and as a petitioner in a deliberately Kafkaesque parody in which she attempts to gain passage through what may be the gate to heaven.

Costello is a prickly, opinionated Australian novelist and essayist in her late sixties when the book begins and probably well into her seventies when it ends. She is past the point of caring much what other people think of her. She is a solitary woman given to speaking her mind and, as such, she makes a lot of people around her uncomfortable. Think Doris Lessing, perhaps, in her later years, only Costello, though well-known in certain literary circles, is not nearly as famous. Regrettably, as Costello sees it, her main claim to a place in the literary firmament is an early novel, "The House on Eccles Street," in which she re-imagined the life of Molly Bloom, thus reclaiming her from the male imagination of her original creator, James Joyce.  

Coetzee seems to have a certain amount of fun using Elizabeth Costello as a front for puncturing the moral complacency and literary pretensions of our time. That said, you only have to take a look at the jacket photo, or practically any photo of Coetzee, to see that this guy is no comedian. He has a pretty sour, dour view of life—well, at the very least, one senses he's an uber-serious fellow without much time for clownish frivolity.

The loose, open-ended "structure" of Coetzee's text—not even the publisher dares call it a "novel"—allows Coetzee to turn this book into a veritable grab-bag into which he has thrown virtually anything that strikes his fancy. Hitler, Descartes, copulation between gods and mortals, African literature, vegetarianism, the Holocaust, Hellenism—one would think it impossible to tie these disparate topics together but Coetzee does so through Costello's often meandering but always cogent lectures, which are never quite what her audiences are expecting—or want.

Costello will appear again as a minor character in at least one other Coetzee novel, although she seems to have died at the end of this one—died, or at least passed into some living "afterlife" in which she moves among us as a ghost with a message. Though what that message is not even Costello (or Coetzee) seems quite able to articulate. Perhaps it is no more complicated than a plea that we bear witness to our times and our own actions during our time with as much clarity and as little self-delusion as humanly possible. As a justification of her own life as a writer, Costello (Coetzee) defends herself before the tribunal of judges at the gate: "I am a writer, and what I write is what I hear. I am a secretary of the invisible, one of many secretaries over the ages. That is my calling: dictation secretary. It is not for me to interrogate, to judge what is given me. I merely write down the words and then test them, test their soundness, to make sure I heard right."

Is this enough to get her past the gatekeepers? Does such a statement mean anything to non-writers, non-artists? I don't know. It would be up to the gatekeeper in the first instance, and to non-writers, non-artists in the second instance, to provide an answer. Coetzee is, in the end, a writer's writer in the old sense. He's something of an unfashionable throwback, his Nobel prize notwithstanding. He takes literature seriously, as a matter of life and death, as a struggle between salvation and damnation, and he does so in a world that, even at it's highest cultural levels, has  compromised to the point of irrelevancy such concerns, where it has not ridiculed and parodied them as hopelessly naive, or simply abandoned them altogether.