This is not a likeable book. I admire Coetzee’s writing a great deal, but Elizabeth Costello never reaches the heights of much of his other work. It has a highly unusual structure, composed of obviously novelistic sections mixed with thinly veiled essays (thinly veiled because they are given by the protagonist as lectures).
J M Coetzee
Vintage 2004, Paperback, 240 pages, £8.99
One of these lectures is highly, and I mean highly, controversial. It advances an argument that suggests a moral equivalence between the Nazi death camps and abattoirs. I have to say that I find it utterly, utterly repugnant. It actually made me very angry, in a way that very few books ever have. This isn’t like reading some link-baiting right-wing attention whore controversialist online: Coetzee is a regular literary prize-winner, is highly intelligent, as anyone who has read his criticism will immediately acknowledge, and possesses a fine human sensibility, yet it’s clear that he means what he says here. Coetzee is fairly well-known as a supporter of animal rights, which I suppose I can just about respect, but this argument is so repellent that I find it taints the entire book.
Full abstract see elizabeth-costello
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