On Reading Coetzee's Elizabeth Costello

I have been reading Coetzee again.

Elizabeth Costello this time.

As usual, I have only the faintest idea what the novel is about.  

It takes me a while with Coetzee usually. 

In this case, he introduces the story, such as it is, with an attempt to distance the reader from the story a la the deconstructionist trends of the eighties and nineties.  After doing that, he then presents a massive novel of ideas.   Then he rips a massive shredding rent between the world of literary ideas (as represented by the novel) and the other world of philosophical ideas (as represented by rights) by depicting an elderly Australian novelist -- who achieved fame with her novel of the real 'Marion Bloom' -- midway through her swan song tour of the world.  Dipping in and out of the lecture circuit, she insists on talking about vegetarianism and animal rights instead of literature.

She is accompanied by her increasingly bemused physicist son. (Coetzee is a mathematician by trade).  Who presumably represents the poor reader.

Because it's Coetzee, it's all very readable and spellbinding, but it is also very annoying to be sitting on the Portland Hills 159 commuter bus at seven in the morning, not very awake, having your mind blown apart by a six page atom bomb of a treatise on how chicken farms are the new Holocaust, and wondering what in the jaysus name is this man trying to tell me right now.

I have decided that Coetzee is getting older (he was in his sixties when he wrote this) and thinking about whether or not there was any point in him having been a writer.  I hope I am not wrong, because I will have wasted my time (and more importantly, his) otherwise.

Anyone with an opinion on this novel is invited to share it.  Of course, I will have sent it back to the library at that point so it will probably be moot.

This is what the Telegraph (Andrew Marr) said about it:

"In the end, as his heroine confronts death, he has been able to raise the deepest questions through some fictional safeguards - without settling on answers, or defending all the arguments as his. But this is fine, because the attentive reader will have been badly jolted. It is why Coetzee is famous: Elizabeth Costello is no cheap shock. It is a serious one.

The New York Times says this:

Old age is for Coetzee what nausea was for Sartre: our defining condition, the necessary horror that grants us access to a moral existence....... Coetzee's unflinching exploration of this desolate and strangely beautiful terrain represents the cruelest and best use to which literature can be put. 

So I guess I am on the right track.

But that is just the purpose of his depiction of the writer Elizabeth Costello.  As usual, his protagonist is someone past the height of their powers.  However, the ideas she puts forward in a series of lectures are mostly about animals and man's relationship to them.  And the suffering that ensues.  Usually his books are about the suffering we inflict on one another (humans) through totalitarianism and ideology.

Coetzee is felt by some to be the African Kafka (in a third subsection of the whole compendium of ideas that are not ideas, he has a section in the book which rips the idea of an African writer to shreds, which almost broke my heart... with a final plea to please read Okri who is the only African writer... and throughout the book he gets Costello to talk about Kafka at length).

Is he trying to write the definitive treatise on himself?

At one point, Coetzee tries to put the two completely disparate themes of the novel together in a lecture by having Costello speak at an Ivy League college and tell them that if she can imagine herself dead, then she can imagine what it's like to be a bat.  Or a chimp.  Or a chicken.  Or a beef steer. 

Understanding our own mortality will guide us towards a deeper compassion for life in all its guises kind of thing.

I don't know.  I haven't finished and because it is so fantastic, I will probably slow right down to make the most of his artistry and pleasure in tormenting us with ideas.

I also have the distinct sense that he is taking the piss out of Margaret Atwood the whole way through the novel, there's something about Costello that really reminds me of the worst of her.... 

Whatever.  JM Coetzee is probably the greatest writer to have lived while I did.  If you haven't read this book, you should, but you should read his earlier stuff first, so you understand where he is coming from.  I particularly recommend:

• The Life and Times of Michael K
• The Master of Petersburg
• Disgrace

in that order.

On collecting the manure dividend

I harvested the first of the peas tonight. Which is the first of the vegetables. If you discount the spinach, which I planted in a crappy wet part of the garden to see how an 'above the ground' crop would do. And then really ignored, because even though I could see from the deck it wasn't doing so well, I don't like spinach enough to put the effort in.

I ignored it and ignored it, and then half-heartedly checked on it, and realised the tall ones were in fact dandelions, and then trudged over to the shed for the hoe (which was broken) and then didn't buy a new one, and, well, you get the picture...

So I have a lot of spinach gone to seed, which Bunny likes to nibble on when he's bored of dandelions.

And some peas.

I went out with a bowl, and even though I only had to go through one gate and not the two that led to our garden at home, suddenly I was nine again and it was Sunday after 10 o'clock Mass on a breezy summer day and I was picking peas for the Queen Mum to go with the roast beef dinner.

My fingers touched every pod and there was that old satisfaction when I found one that was bursting with goodness, straining against the pod.

Twist and pull. Just like Paddy showed me.

It was all I could do not to sit on the back door step and shell them immediatey, stuffing most of them in my mouth.

But Himself is working nights down on the waterfront this week, so I will leave them for him to enjoy when he gets home... seeing as he designed and built the special stands they are twined around.

There is nothing that man can't do with some 2 x 4 and a piece of netting.

If he decides he wants to, of course.


After a lot of work, and some sunshine and just enough rain our garden is starting to make progress.  The potatoes and corn are very vigorous, so I am hopeful.  The pumpkin patch had about a 10 per cent success rate, which is not too bad considering we were making it up as we went along. 

We only need enough pumpkins for Hallowe'en anyways... I can't eat the stuff.

We are on our second round of cucumbers as Bunny likes them too.

And the tomatos are succeeding against all the odds.  Just when they needed to be tended I took a huff with the garden and ignored it for about two weeks straight.  Then got a rush of guilt and watered the bejaysus out of the little seedlings three nights in a row.  It appears to have worked, we have about fifty sturdy plants now.

I can't wait until the greenhouse smells of tomatos... it is the best smell in the world.  Better than cut grass even.

This year I managed to get a bit of formal gardening done as well.  I put in a new small bed, and cleaned up the SEVEN beds we have found around the property. 

Holy of holies, it's exhausting though.  And back-breaking.  I have been to the massage therapist so often this year he's been reading up on gardener's elbow.  Basically what happened (I think) was that a woman who used to live here designed and planted all the beds.  Then she split up with her husband and they sold the house.  Before they left they mulched the beds. 

Seven years passed and nobody disturbed them.  Then along comes I, all vim and vigour last year and took out all the mulch. 

Twenty six years of pent up weedlings saw their opportunity and SPRANG FORTH AND MULTIPLIED.

I am getting there.

It will be manageable in about five years, I reckon.

I've decided to plant lots of Asians so there will be no ground cover underneath.  Hydrangeas, rhododendrons, wigelias, that kind of thing.

Starve the little bastards out, you might say.

A garden truly is a lifetime's work.