A humane, moral and uncompromising new novel from J.M. Coetzee, twice winner of the Booker Prize and one of the finest authors writing in the English language.
J.M. Coetzee's work includes DUSKLANDS In the heart of the country, WAITING FOR THE BARBARIANS, which was awarded the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize, the James Tait Black Memorial Prize and the CNA Prize, LIFE AND TIMES OF MICHAEL K, which won the Booker Prize and the Prix Etranger Femina, FOE, AGE OF IRON, which won the Sunday Express Book of the Year Award, THE MASTER OF PETERSBURG, which won the Irish Times International Fiction Award and the memoirs BOYHOOD and YOUTH: Scenes from Provincial Life. His novel, DISGRACE, won the Booker Prize, making him the first author to have won this prestigious prize twice. His more recent novels include ELIZABETH COSTELLO, DIARY OF A BAD YEAR and SLOW MAN. SUMMERTIME has been shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, the Commonwealth Writers' Prize for South-East Asia and the Pacific, and the Adelaide Festival Literature Award. It won the Christina Stead Prize for Fiction at the NSW Premier's Literary Awards in 2009.
A brilliant technique: Coetzee purports to disclose the life of a distinguished Australian through eight speeches she gave. No wonder he's won two Bookers. Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.
Even more uncompromising than usual, this latest novel by Coetzee (his first since 1999's Booker Prize-winning Disgrace) blurs the bounds of fiction and nonfiction while furthering the author's exploration of urgent moral and aesthetic questions. Elizabeth Costello, a fictional aging Australian novelist who gained fame for a Ulysses-inspired novel in the 1960s, reveals the workings of her still-formidable mind in a series of formal addresses she either attends or delivers herself (an award acceptance speech, a lecture on a cruise ship, a graduation speech). This ingenious structure allows Coetzee to circle around his protagonist, revealing her preoccupations and contradictions her relationships with her son, John, an academic, and her sister, Blanche, a missionary in Africa; her deep, almost fanatical concern with animal rights; her conflicted views on reason and realism; her grapplings with the human problems of sex and spirituality. The specters of the Holocaust and colonialism, of Greek mythology and Christian morality, and of Franz Kafka and the absurd haunt the novel, as Coetzee deftly weaves the intense contemplation of abstractions with the everyday life of an all-too-human body and mind. The struggle for self-expression comes to a wrenching climax when Elizabeth faces a final reckoning and finds herself at a loss for words. This is a novel of weighty ideas, concerned with what it means to be human and with the difficult and seductive task of making meaning. It is a resounding achievement by Coetzee and one that will linger with the reader long after its reverberating conclusion. (Oct. 20) Forecast: This is not the most accessible of Coetzee's novels, but it is an important addition to the author's body of work and heady reading for those who enjoy novels of ideas. Most of the book's chapters have been published separately, two as part of the nonfiction volume The Lives of Animals (Princeton, 1999). Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.
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