Elizabeth Costello

infobox Book |
name = Elizabeth Costello
title_orig =
translator =


image_caption =
author = J. M. Coetzee
cover_artist =
country = Australia
language = English
series =
genre = Fiction, Literature
publisher = Secker & Warburg
release_date = 30 September 2003
media_type = Print (Hardback), (Paperback)
pages = 224pp
isbn = ISBN 0436206161
preceded_by =
followed_by =

" 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 second last chapter, "At the Gate", is an overt reworking of several of Franz Kafka's stories and novels, principally of "Before the Law" and "The Trial". The last chapter consists of the letter of Lady Chandos to Francis Bacon. This is a fictitious intertext to the well-known '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' letter replicates what in the novel Elizabeth Costello herself is presented having done, namely, to add a female voice (that of Molly Bloom) to a canonical modernist work (Ulysses).

Awards

* 2003 longlisted for the Man Booker Prize
* 2004 shortlisted for the Miles Franklin Award

Reviews

*
*

Footnotes