I'm glad I was able to read it and especially glad I didn't have to pay $20 to buy it. I thought Coetzee's "academic novella" had poorly written characters and a badly told story, if it was supposed to be story.

However, I was delighted and surprised to see Peter Singer's work of "fiction." Seems like he had a ball writing that! What a talented writer and astute ethicist (Singer). I bet Singer would have written a much better academic novella than Coetzee. And ... isn't Coetzee a fiction writer, normally? That's what I get from some of the references the other writers made toward him. If that's the case, I'm surprised that Coetzee's part of the book was such a chore to read.

Here are my impressions as I read the 6 sections of the book:

1) Introduction (written by Amy Gutmann) ... "Gee, is this a Cliff's notes version of Coetzee's novella and the responses that follow?" I wondered. And, having read this, I wondered, do I even need to bother reading the book? Gutmann's introduction did not whet my appetite for reading more. However, I dutifully read on.

2) Coetzee's novella ... Some of the arguments discussed are interesting. For example, I liked the discussion of "rational thinking" experiments on primates and enjoyed reading about the alternate questions that one might consider when presented with a challenge. Unfortunately, the various ideas were presented in such a mish-mash, through the eyes of very unsympathetic characters, one and all. Well, I just couldn't wait to finish reading and be done with it.

REFLECTIONS

3) Marjorie Garber (Literary Analysis) ... Not being very well-read in literature and ethics myself, I clearly missed all the inside jokes that were happening ... names of characters and places specifically chosen to sound like fictional characters and places, or real-world writers and scholars, etc. OK. But that didn't change my feeling of how poorly written this was! I was intrigued by the idea that perhaps Coetzee "wasn't writing the book we thought he was writing," and that instead he was writing a book about the value of literature. I love that concept, but what an awful way to go about it. In my opinion, writing something so lacking in emotional depth or entertainment value is a terrible way to argue for the value of literature.

4) Peter Singer (Animal Rights / Ethics) ... Oh my goodness, what a surprise!!!! This is truly a lovely read. Humorous and full of life, and astutely written! And now, finally ... because of the delightful way that Singer writes about his own assignment to respond to Coetzee's lecture material ... I FINALLY understand what the heck is going on with what I thought was a poorly written novella by Coetzee. Apparently Coetzee was tasked with writing and presenting 2 lectures at a university (the Tanner Lectures?). So, Coetzee created a two-part novella with fictional characters who would discuss the topics that he had planned to cover in his lecture.

Aha! I see it now. Yes, if you were expecting to show up and listen to some droll essay on animal rights, and instead, the lecturer spiced it up by presenting it within this "fictional framework," you'd be delighted! You'd say, "Oh, goody!" You know how the whole room bursts into laughter when an academic lecturer makes even the most feeble attempt at humor? People are bored out of their gourds, and they're stuck there, too ... a captive audience ... they are dying for even the slightest bit of levity or humor. So, in an academic lecture setting, the bar is set very low for what qualifies as passable entertainment. Very well then. Now I understand.

Receiving this bit of news from Peter Singer's commentary ... so late in the game, in fact, so long AFTER the game was over ... (i.e., I was already DONE reading Coetzee's novella) ... I think the INTRODUCTION fails miserably for not making the situation clear from the beginning.

I believe a more effective intro would have been something like what follows:

"The work you are about to read was written for a lecture series given by the author at such and such University on such and such date. Sit back and imagine yourself stuck in a lecture hall, prepared to hear a long and potentially droll, possibly even rambling, exposition on ethics. Then imagine your surprise when the lecturer instead presents the work as a piece of fiction.

"As you read, don't expect a novel written specifically for entertainment or emotional engagement, and don't be surprised that the fictional characters and events are thinly cobbled together. The lecturer would have expected the audience to recognize immediately that these are merely devices for portraying the philosophical and ethical arguments that are the true subject of the lecture. Instead, imagine yourself in a stuffy and crowded lecture hall, listening as a lecturer presents his points in a novel and surprising way.

"After Coetzee's two-part novella, we have included commentary on the content and writing style, written by individuals hailing from four different backgrounds: literary criticism, animal rights/ethics, religious education, and animal behavior science. We hope these voices will provide additional insight into Coetzee's work."

Something like that (written by a professional writer who could do a much better job, of course) would have been SO HELPFUL as the introduction. If I were the editor, I would completely toss the current "Introduction" and replace it with a simple statement such as the one above.

Oh, but back to how I feel about Singer's contribution. Yes, it was awesome. Not only was it witty and funny and smart, for its own sake, but even more importantly, it made me understand what I was supposed to be "getting" as I read Coetzee's work. Sadly, by shining so brightly, Singer's commentary demonstrated how effective Coetzee's literary device could have been and how far it fell short. Even so, I feel inspired to go back and re-read Coetzee's writing ... it certainly may feel different (and may seem much improved!) now that I know the context.


5) Wendy Doniger (Religious Education/Spirituality) ... the comments on how various religions and cultures perceive animal and human sacrifices and/or vegetarianism were interesting, and I learned some new things. But the essay didn't add much insight into Coetzee's work or why he wrote it the way he did.

6) Barbara Smuts (Animal Behavioral Science) ... I enjoyed reading about Smuts' experience with animals, but here again, I don't believe the essay added very much insight into Coetzee's work. Perhaps the point was simply to remark on some ideas that Smuts believes Coetzee should have included.

I'm curious to see how I will feel about all of the above after a re-read. I've seen the rave reviews, and obviously I'm not "feelin' it" right now. It's possible this is one of those books that requires a second read to fully appreciate.

Anyway, the book will make for some very good book club discussion, I think!

This novella is actually the two-part lecture that Coetzee gave at Princeton in 1997. Here Coetzee presents the topic of human cruelty toward animals through fiction, with fiction writer Elizabeth Costello invited to give a distinguished lecture at a university, and this is her topic of choice. The controversy of her lecture is argued, discussed, and rebutted by academic characters including Costello's son and his wife. The philosophical, poetical, and literal approaches to Costello's chosen subject are many layers within the novel. Morality and ethics come into question, but the story itself is not just a clear-cut animal rights argument; on the contrary, Costello's lecture on animal cruelty has anything but a solid conclusion, or even solution. There seems to be more at work here than what Coetzee presents on the surface.

With reflective essays by a moral philosopher, religion scholar, literary critic, and primatologist to give Coetzee's lectures even more dimension, this novella is a thought-provoking and mysteriously crafted narrative. It questions the morality and empathy of human beings in our treatment of animals, but also engages us on a more cognitive level. As Marjorie Garber says in her essay, "In these two elegant lectures we thought John Coetzee was talking about animals. Could it be, however, that all along he was really asking, 'What is the value of literature?'". In all, it's good food for thought.

the barbara smuts essay was by far the best part of this book. interesting food for thought in each, but more so through new literary comparisons i hadn't thought of/known of rather than new approaches to animal theory. i liked coetzee's format of a frame narrative to avoid attachments to specific claims (and singer's mirroring of this). i did not like costello's insistance on the use of the holocaust analogy and enjoyed that she received pushback on it from abraham stern. i think for the most part this book was a bit forgetable to me but smuts beyond saved it with her absolutely beautiful essay.

"What is so special about the form of consciousness we recognize that makes killing a bearer of it a crime while killing an animal goes unpunished?"

A thought-provoking novel on the ethics of humanity's treatment and consumption of animals, made all the more effective by Coetzee's masterful use of characters. The story revolves primarily around Costello, a writer of fiction invited to make a talk before a large conference of academics who chooses to speak against the consumption of animals, flipping the 'slaughterhouse' metaphors of the holocaust to argue that this unexamined acceptance of these methods for animals is morally reprehensible. But where Coetzee really shines is in preempting arguments againsts Costello, and embodying these arguments in other characters, creating a beautiful richness of discourse. Thus, a poet who objects to attending the following lecture leaves a letter calling this comparison out as a form of appropriation and a trick with words, arguing that "Man is made in the likeness of God but God does not have the likeness of Man. If Jews were treated like cattle, it does not follow that cattle were treated like Jews."

The novel (novella?) is followed by equally lovely commentary from professors of four disparate disciplines, in the spirit of the novel. Barbara Smuts in particular, a professor of Psychology and Anthropology, has lovingly argued for the personhood of animals from her experience with dogs, baboons, and other primates. While Peter Singer, bioethicist, writes a self-aware short story from the perspective of a father and academic planning a professional response to Coetzee's Costello on the topic of bioethics, emphasizing the difficulty of this given the distance Coetzee establishes from these arguments by emodying them in a fictional character and preempting critiques like those above. While Wendy Doniger, historian of religion, provides context for Vedic religions' relationship to vegetarianism and meat eating. And Margorie Garber informs us on the genre of academic novels and the intersection of english studies and psychoanalysis as regard The Lives of Animals.

Alguns livros (talvez todos) possuem um tempo certo para serem lidos e quase intuitivamente esse foi o melhor momento para ler The lives of animals. Coetzee, que não é bobo, organiza esse romance (ou novela, alguns podem preferir assim) em forma de palestras dadas pela escritora Elizabeth Costello, super envolvida na causa animal. Mediando essa situação, temos o filho dela, John, e a nora, Norma. Obviamente a relação entre as duas não é das melhores e isso se mostra claramente através dos questionamentos filosóficos super racionais de Norma.
Coetzee tira o corpo fora, mas colocando muito de suas convicções nessa história: os animais merecem viver? É preciso mesmo parar de comer carne? Ainda, uma pergunta quase sutil, mas que acaba gritando: a literatura pode, em algum sentido, mudar alguma coisa?
O mais bacana foi ver uma série de autores com os quais convivi através de leituras durante esse ano servindo de argumento para as palestras de Costello: Mary Midgley, Tim Ingold, Peter Singer. Além, claro, de reiterar os pensamentos clássicos sobre o tema, de Platão a Kant.
Excelente livro, sem ser aquela enchida de saco panfletária. Convida à reflexão.

As someone who recently adopted a plant-based diet and is happy with the choice, I was rather curious about this book. It's a rather philosophical approach to the topic... I missed the emotional/compassionate voice I would expect the protagonist to have in advocating her cause. The result was a pseudo intellectual exercise in thought, too dry for my liking. My problem with Coetzee is that his writing is too didactic, never leaving room for the reader to imagine and to engage.

Excelente reflexión acerca del trato a los animales, las bestias somos nosotros !!!

Excellent. Brief and resounding.
Highly recommend. Though a bit intellectual at times, very human and bits and pieces resonated with me very deeply. It left me pondering and wondering about some ideas, and most importantly, towards the end it managed to put into words something that had implicitly and covertly been troubling me for a while:

“- {...} What is it that you can't say?
- It’s that I no longer know where I am. I seem to move around perfectly easily among people, to have perfectly normal relations with them. Is it possible, I ask myself, that all of them are participants in a crime of stupefying proportions? Am I fantasizing it all? I must be mad! Yet every day I see the evidences. The very people I suspect produce the evidence, exhibit it, offer it to me. Corpses. Fragments of corpses that they have bought for money.

It is as if I were to visit friends, and to make some polite remark about the lamp in their living room, and they were to say, “Yes, it’s nice, isn’t it? Polish-Jewish skin it’s made of, we find that’s best, the skins of young Polish-Jewish virgins.” And then I go to the bathroom and the soap wrapper says, “Treblinka – 100% human stereate.” Am I dreaming, I say to myself? What kind of house is this?

Yet I’m not dreaming. I look into your eyes, into Norma’s, into the children’s, and I see only kindness, human kindness. Calm down, I tell myself, you are making a mountain out of a molehill. This is life. Everyone else comes to terms with it, why can't you? Why can't you?”

Need more bad asses like Costello brown-nosing academics

i read this long after reading elizabeth costello, and, thus, did so simply for the essays (of which i particularly enjoyed the barbara smuts one)

short and powerful, an essay through fiction.
feeling the disgust thrown upon his mother by norma is gut wrenching, the defence of coming to terms of being a murderer of animals. i can relate deeply and fondly with his mother, slowly slipping into ‘this is it? this is life and how we treat it?’ in an age of genocide this book hits even more deeply. words cannot fix this but what can and how…

Excellently written discussion on animal rights and ethics of currently prevailing human approach towards animals.