J.M. Coetzee’s latest book is about literature and
reason.

It manages as well to be a book about aging, ethics, African
culture, divinity, the beauty of women’s breasts and a host
of salient topics in between. “Elizabeth Costello” is a
volume that, while physically diminutive, is a hefty tome. Its 233
pages are sure to be multiplied by repeated readings from those who
undertake it seriously.

The front of the volume announces “fiction,” belying
its unique style. Divided into eight “lessons” and a
postscript, the narrative follows loosely its titular protagonist,
an esteemed Australian writer, often skipping through large spans
of time. The lessons themselves are mostly descriptions of lectures
and arguments produced by Elizabeth, and Coetzee has published most
of them separately throughout the years. Lessons 3 and 4, for
example, were read as the Tanner Lectures at Princeton University
and published with responses by several prominent philosophers as
“The Lives of Animals.”

Coetzee’s decision to write what could have been a series
of philosophical tracts as a work of literary fiction is bound to
draw unnecessary ire. In the third lesson, Elizabeth contends that
what goes on in the world’s slaughterhouses is worse than the
treatment of Hitler’s victims in concentration camps. Coetzee
is not blind to the statement’s implications. Elizabeth is
pilloried in Commentary, and headlines announce accusations of
anti-Semitism against her.

Rather than having her be an Ayn Rand-style vehicle for his
philosophical muse, Coetzee breathes humanity into Elizabeth. As
the book progresses, Elizabeth becomes further fraught with
worries. She realizes she has grown old. Her lectures, observed by
her son, lack their former passion. In the final lesson, Elizabeth
finds herself in a Kafkaesque limbo. Standing before a gate, she is
asked to declare her beliefs before she can pass. Troubled, she
states that she has no beliefs. She is, in her words, “a
secretary of the invisible.” She can muster little more than
a series of uncertain metaphors based in her youth.

We are reminded of the first lesson —
“Realism.” Elizabeth, in a lecture given upon the
acceptance of a prize for her writing, explains how Kafka’s
work fractured the way we look at literature: “We used to
believe that when the text said, ‘On the table stood a glass
of water,’ there was indeed a table, and a glass of water on
it, and we had only to look in the word-mirror of the text to see
them.” Today, however, “The word-mirror is broken,
irreparably it seems.” Word-mirror indeed. When reading
“Elizabeth Costello,” it is unclear to what degree
Elizabeth is an opaque reflection of Coetzee himself.

With its dense collection of literary references and clouded
allegory, the book is often difficult and not immediately
rewarding. Nevertheless, the mirror of literary realism requires
the occasional shattering, and Coetzee, this year’s winner of
the Nobel Prize in Literature, hurls some heavy stones.

Rating: 4 stars.