For Australian writer JM Coetzee, winner of two Booker Prizes and the 2003 Nobel Prize for Literature, the world of receiving literary awards and giving speeches must be such a commonplace that he has put the circuit at the centre of his book, Elizabeth Costello. As the work opens, the eponymous Elizabeth, a fictional novelist, is in Williamstown, Pennsylvania, to receive the Stowe Award. For her speech at the Williamstown's Altona College she chooses the tired topic, "What Is Realism?" and quickly loses her audience in her unfocused discussion of Kafka. From there, readers follow her to a cruise ship where she is virtually imprisoned as a celebrity lecturer to the ship's guests. Next, she is off to Appleton College where she delivers the annual Gates Lecture. Later, she will even attend a graduation speech.

Happy Reading!

RELEASE NOTES:

To release at the Birmingham meet up at Hudsons, as part of the Unconvention weekend.

picked up at Hudson's whilst attending the Unconvention in Birmingham.

Interesting read. The chapters are tied together by Elizabeth Costello, either as speeches she gives or listens to. I particularly found the African novel ideas and the Philosophy and Animals chapters very interesting, both gave me plenty to think about. Will be looking out for my own copy of this as I am a big Coetzee fan.

RELEASE NOTES:

Sending out as a surprise rabck. Hope you enjoy it.

This wonderful surprise arrived in this evening's post, in the middle of a horrible rain storm. Thanks so much, perfect-circle -- this was so kind of you! I'm in the middle of War and Peace right now (seriously), but this book goes straight to the top of my "read next" pile. Warmest best wishes from New Westminster, British Columbia.

A 2003 novel by South African novelist John Coetzee which, in a series of speeches, interviews and book talks, reveals the insights of Elizabeth Costello, a prize-winning Australian novelist approaching her sixty-seventh birthday. Many reviewers have observed that Elizabeth is somewhat of a a stand-in for Coetzee himself ("The Novel in Africa" is the text of his November 1998 Una's lecture at the Townsend Center for the Humanities in Berkeley, and Elizabeth's ideas about the souls of animals are taken from Coetzee's Tanner Lectures at Princeton), yet there seems to be something more going on with Elizabeth. As she approaches old age (about which much is made in the book: descriptions of Elizabeth's softening body and whitening hair, declining stamina and occasionally doddering behaviour) she dissembles, wallowing in her fixation on the souls and suffering of animals, entering an ill-advised debate on African fiction with a Nigerian novelist, and indulging in ruminations on the possibility of sex between mortals and gods.

The last chapters of this book takes the reader from the real world of the fictional Elizabeth, with her many preoccupations, to somewhere new and -- Coetzee openly concedes in the text -- entirely allegorical. At this point I lost patience with Elizabeth Costello, which in the final analysis strikes me as a volume stitched together from a bunch of scattered and unrelated remnants on Coetzee's hard drive (perhaps at the insistence of a greedy publisher?). Really disappointing.

Astonishingly, Elizabeth Costello was longlisted for the 2003 Booker Prize (Coetzee didn't win, but then he'd already won the prize twice for Life & Times of Michael K. and Disgrace). You can read reviews of Elizabeth Costello in the Guardian here, the Observer here, the Telegraph here, the New York Times here (free subscription required), the Village Voice here and The African Review of Books here.

(Top left: author J.M. Coetzee.)

RELEASE NOTES:

I'll be leaving this book, along with several others, on the newspaper boxes on the main level at Burrard Street Skytrain station. Best wishes and happy reading to whomever picks it up!