E Costello
Rain Taxi’s new edition has a good review by Michael Sayeau of JM Coetzee’s Elizabeth Costello, which I’ve just read.
The novel had a mixed reception, due to the author’s indifference to fashion and playing to the crowds. Some reviewers are slaves to both. Elsewhere I’ve provided links to a review interested in the question of literature and one not. I’d say it is one of the best novels of the year. No problem.
I have reservations, however. It’s not a great novel. Its animation of the question as posed by Sayeau: “Can Coetzee–and can we–still do fiction?” is powerful, but there is something missing. I don’t know what, exactly. The expression of distress and pain in the eponymous character does seem remote, rhetorical. Maybe that’s it. Yet that is also part of that question: can we still do fiction? The question is not one of talent - there is a surplus of that - but the meaning of life. If Coetzee has failed, it is not his failure. And if he has succeeded in revealing fiction’s failure, then …
Whenever I get around to writing reviews again, I will look into it. And I intend to eventually. First, one on WG Sebald’s On the Natural History of Destruction just about the time it comes out in paperback. That’s another book that stimulates beyond its apparent limits.
Other Splinters posts of interest:
- Elizabeth Costello
- As the veneer of democracy starts to fade Check…
- Coetzee gets Wood
- The big question
- Having read Disgrace
