"Hangi adımın önce, hangisinin sonra atılacağını öğrenene kadar, dans edemeyecek hale gelmesi, elden ayaktan düşmesi şart mıdır kişinin?"

Elisabeth Costello è un libro che devi decidere di voler leggere.
Primo punto a favore: la scrittura, qualitativamente impeccabile.
Secondo punto a favore: la particolarità dell’opera, che mescola fiction e non-fiction. La costruzione narrativa serve da contenitore a sei lezioni, sotto forma di conferenze o comunque flussi di pensiero su uno specifico argomento. Non vi mentirò dicendo che sono state lezioni semplici da seguire, no, però tutte sono interessanti, originali e profonde. Vanno dal concetto di male in letteratura - quanto è lecito addentrarsi? Qual è il limite della decenza? Quanto può servire? Quanto può nuocere? - allo scopo del romanzo, il suo futuro; la prima è una riflessione sul realismo, l’ultima sulla fede. La caratteristica particolare è che ogni opinione non è mai assolutamente, la protagonista si contraddice, oppure arriva qualcuno che la pensa in maniera opposta. Quindi un libro molto “celebrale” con i suoi alti ed i suoi bassi, ma unico nel suo genere.

I have only one question when it comes to this book: What does it NOT tackle? In the brevity of approximately 200 pages, Coetzee is able to refer to the following:
-- ethical treatment of animals and humans with reference to the Holocaust
-- war and post-war trauma
-- the issue of ethnicity, blackness, and black literature
-- the author's battle with his text in order to remain 'alive', not letting it sublimate him
-- questions regarding canonicity
-- the anxiety of influence
-- a plethora of intertextual relations from Woolf to Kafka to Joyce
-- family relationships, love, sexuality
-- the effect of time on the individual, both on the mortal and the psychological planes
and many others...

And all of these factors are seamlessly integrated within the text without forgetting the main narrative. Instead, these factors serve the narrative in order to supplement it further. My first Coetzee and it will surely not be the last!

O zdobyciu i przeczytaniu „Elizabeth Costello” marzyłam od obejrzenia (A)pollonii, a konkretnie niesamowitego monologu w wykonaniu Mai Ostaszewskiej, który Krzysztof Warlikowski zaczerpnął z powieści Coetzee.
Elizabeth Costello, to fikcyjna pisarka w więcej niż średnim wieku, zanana przede wszystkim z napisanej w młodości powieści „Domu przy Eccles Street”, której bohaterką uczyniła feministycznie przebudzoną Marion Bloom (tak, tak! żonę TEGO Blooma, niestety to mocno poboczny temat). Podróżując po świecie protagonistka wygłasza wykłady i to one są kolejnymi rozdziałami tego zbioru esejów raczej, niż klasycznej powieści. My, czytelnicy, mamy szansę obserwować jak jej stan psychiczny czy interakcje z innymi wpływają na sposób myślenia i wygłaszane opinie. I choć po lekturze to niezmiennie fragment o Czerwonym Piotrusiu (tak, tak! Kafkowskim Piotrusiu) pozostaje moim ulubionym, to jak zawsze u Coetzee możemy zachłysnąć się pobudzającymi do przemyśleń tematami. Od literatury i jej oraz pisarza roli, przez traktowanie zwierząt i humanizm, po pytanie o to, kim jesteśmy i czy wczorajsza prawda o nas, dalej jest prawdą. Bez wątpienia trafia do ulubionych, jak i poprzednie pozycje pisarza.

n  «Maledetta letteratura!»n
Scomodo, imprevedibile, destabilizzante.

A though book to review unless you decide to read it.

4* Disgrace
4* Waiting for the Barbarians
3* A Ilha
4* The Master of Petersburg
3* Slow Man
3* Elizabeth Costello
TR Dusklands
TR Youth
TR Boyhood
TR Life and Times of Michael K
TR Summertime
TR The Schooldays of Jesus

"Sono una scrittrice, commercio in finzioni. Sono una scrittrice e scrivo quello che ascolto. Sono una segretaria dell’invisibile"

Uno scritto estremamente originale che vien da definire romanzo - saggio.

Attraverso sei lezioni/dissertazioni Coetzee per il tramite della anziana scrittrice Elisabeth Costello (alter ego dell'autore nella finzione narrativa) si apre, si espone, si sbilancia, si rammarica ... e compone una sorta di testamento spirituale sulle tematiche legate alla vita e alla letteratura che gli stanno più a cuore. Alcuni dei temi affrontati nelle lezioni: il realismo, la narrativa in africa, il problema del male in letteratura.

Non sviluppa una storia con una morale, l'etica è l'oggetto stesso delle riflessioni. Non è un romanzo etico, ma un romanzo sull'etica.

Sul problema del male:
"In particolare, non è piú cosí convinta che la gente venga sempre migliorata da quello che legge. Inoltre non è convinta che gli scrittori che si avventurano nei piú oscuri territori dell’anima ne escano sempre incolumi. Ha cominciato a chiedersi se scrivere quello che si vuole scrivere, né piú né meno che leggere quello che si vuole leggere, sia di per sé una buona cosa."

Una forma di scrittura che si nutre del contraddittorio, in ciascuna lezione Elisabeth argomenta e discute le sue idee attraverso un dibattito con una controparte che muta di lezione in lezione, vivace e acuta che confuta la scrittrice con argomentazioni di livello.
La posizione dell'autrice è quasi sempre quella del dubbio, spesso appare confusa, si ricrede per poi tornare con determinazione sulle sue convinzioni innescando domande nel lettore senza fornire risposte preconfezionate.

"...non crede piú tanto nel credere. Le cose possono essere vere, pensa ora, anche se uno non ci crede, e viceversa."

Si parla di lezioni ma in esse non vi si ritrova nulla di didascalico.

Si distingue tra gli altri l'ultima lezione, "Davanti alla porta" - racconto kafkiano. Alla scrittrice viene chiesto di esporre il suo credo da una non meglio identificata commissione esaminatrice come condizione necessaria per attraversare la porta (o una delle porte ) che le si parano innanzi.

"Credo in quelle piccole rane....
Esistono, che io ve lo racconti o meno, che io ci creda o meno . È per via dell’indifferenza di quelle piccole rane al fatto che io creda (tutto quello che vogliono dalla vita è ingozzarsi di zanzare e cantare; e i maschi tra loro, quelli che cantano di piú, non cantano per saturare con la loro melodia l’aria notturna ma come forma di corteggiamento, per cui sperano di essere premiati con l’orgasmo, la varietà di orgasmo delle rane, e cosí via all’infinito), è a causa della loro indifferenza nei miei confronti che credo in loro."

Una lettura veramente molto interessante che pretende un lettore attivo con voglia di ragionare e porsi domande e cercare di darsi risposte individuali.

Un po' saggio ed un po' racconto, se fosse un film sarebbe un "mockumentary". La scrittrice Elizabeth Costello (alter ego di Coetzee stesso), si concede con generosità anche se controvoglia alle liturgie letterarie (convegni, premi, lectiones magistrales , interviste) che Coetzee invece ha sempre evitato, e difende con forza le proprie convinzioni dall'assalto delle banalità e dei conformismi degli interlocutori di turno.

Siccome si tratta di "lezioni" la scrittrice che parla di se stessa guarda sempre (doppiamente) dall'alto in basso il lettore, che poi è per lo più un acculturato o un addetto ai lavori. Figuriamoci che opinione deve avere dei normali lettori.
Leggo sulla pagina Wikipedia dedicata a Coetzee che il Nobel 2003 (peraltro per altre opere anche meritato) è stato attribuito dagli ineffabili accademici scandinavi soprattutto per questa opera.

Letteratura al quadrato, anzi al cubo (si parla di una scrittrice che riflette ed interpreta il proprio modo di descrivere la realtà), molta cultura, certamente virtuosismo, ma anche molta autoreferenzialità che alla fine lascia molta freddezza.

رواية فكرية جدلية يناقش فيها جى ام كوتزي كثير من الأفكار والقضايا
بحث في الجوانب الفكرية والفلسفية لموضوعات مختلفة
الرواية على شكل سلسلة من المحاضرات والسفر واللقاءات للكاتبة اليزابث كستلو
كستلو روائية استرالية تقترب من السبعين وهي شخصية محيرة وأفكارها متناقضة إلى حد ما
من الموضوعات المثيرة للاهتمام, الواقعية وهوية الانسان الحقيقية أمام نفسه ومع الناس
التراث الشفاهي وأصل وتطور الرواية في أفريقيا, النظر بوعي لحياة الحيوان وحقوقه
أيضا مشكلة الشر الكامن في النفس البشرية والتساؤل عن أثر الكتابة وكشف أثر البشاعة والشرور على الإنسانية
وفي النهاية يصل كوتزي بكاتبته إلى بوابة ما- ربما بعد الموت – تحاول اجتيازها
ونتركها وهي تُعيد التفكير في معتقداتها التي تؤمن بها بعد أن قيل لها "بدون معتقدات لا نكون بشرا.

بعض الأفكار ممتازة والأهم الدلالات المختلفة المؤيِدة للأفكار من الأحداث والأعمال الأدبية
الرواية وضحت صخب الأفكار ومحاولات التدليل في ذهن كستلو أو الأصح في ذهن كوتزي

Elizabeth Costello is Coetzee's alter ego. And for most of the book, she is giving her opinions on different subjects- realism, women's voice in novels, violence against animals, African novel, Humanity's future - a study in Christ's cross vs Mary's breasts (Mary's breasts won), nature of evil, the impact a book on an evil subject can have on people, mechanics involved when Gods had sex with humans (I like the way this woman thinks) etc. S0me of these are given as lectures, the content of which is borrowed from actual lectures Coetzee gave. The most important subject is animal violence but i have already discussed it.

Another interesting subject is influence a book on an 'evil' subject can have on its writer. Can a writer or reader come out scratched? Most people considered Costello's fears baseless. But 2012 Auror shootings seems to prove that such fears are groundless, but the trouble is letting the fears rule one often leads to bad choices, in this case, it might result in some people calling for censorships when all one needs to use a bit of caution.

Anyway, the last part is where Costello, now dead, finds herself on the threshold of world beyond and denied entry because she has kept refusing to ever have any kind of belief - showing that she saw herself as divorced from things she believed in. The part is heavily inspired from Kafka. Anyone wanting to read it shall do well to read Kafka's short stories'Before the law' and 'A Report to the academy'.

An internationally respected Australian writer in her mid-sixties, Elizabeth Costello is known primarily for her fourth book, The House on Eccles Street, in which she took a minor character from Joyce's Ulysses, Marion Bloom, and created the kind of novel people are still talking about today. That novel was published nearly thirty years ago; now it's 1995 and Elizabeth Costello has arrived in Pennsylvania to accept the Stowe Award, worth $50,000, from Altona College. Her son John, a physics and astronomy professor in Massachusetts, accompanies her. Her acceptance speech is on realism in fiction, but what she really talks about is her own floundering sense of self, growing ever more perplexed, unsure, vague, bewildered.

So begins Elizabeth Costello, a novel of life and death structured around eight "lessons", most of which are essay-like lectures that the author, JM Coetzee, delivered himself at various events listed in the Acknowledgements page (in the character of Elizabeth Costello, apparently). The "lessons" revolve around questions of ideology and the philosophy of death, touching mainly upon the plight of animals grown en masse for human consumption, and the notion of evil.

I began this with absolutely no idea what it was about - and while I've had it on my shelf for a few years, I decided to read it now because, not knowing what it was about, I was looking for (and thought I'd found) a book set in South Africa, for the Around the World in 12 Books Challenge. There is only one chapter where Elizabeth Costello (like all famous people, she can't be just "Elizabeth" or "Ms Costello" but always, always "Elizabeth Costello") travels to Zululand where her older sister Blanche - or Sister Bridget - is a renowned humanitarian and fundraiser, accepting an honorary doctorate; other settings are Melbourne, in her own home (though this setting isn't explored or described), Amsterdam, and America. So I couldn't use it for that challenge. I also read this not knowing its real life background, so it was interesting to learn how Coetzee had given these lectures and debates himself on previous occasions, and how he incorporated the criticisms he received into the life of Elizabeth Costello, within the novel itself.

For example, the one that he got the most flak for was the speech on animals, factory-farm animals like battery hens etc., in which Elizabeth Costello compared them to the Nazi concentration and death camps of World War II. One of the professors at the university where she gives this speech, a Jewish man, takes offence and refuses to sit with her at dinner, telling her in a letter: "If Jews were treated like cattle, it does not follow that cattle are treated like Jews. The inversion insults the memory of the dead. It also trades on the horrors of the camps in a cheap way." The criticism she receives after this event is mentioned later in the novel; this is also the criticism Coetzee himself received, or so I read when I was looking for reviews of this book (and I didn't find much in the way of fellow book-blogger reviews).

Elizabeth Costello raises many interesting, thought-provoking ideas, many of which are perhaps provoking to different kinds of people, but that only makes them more important to openly discuss, not repress. I have to say that in some ways I agree with her take on animals, though I'm not sure she articulated her point all that clearly: namely, that even if animals by and large do not have the capacity for conscious thought that humans do, doesn't mean we are given license to treat them abominably, "like animals" as the expression goes.

She raises the arguments of philosophers and researchers from various eras, who argued that because animals can't think like humans, that it's okay to treat them the way we do - something like the people, not just Jews but predominantly Jews, rounded up by the Nazis. Some of the types of people the Nazis also put into concentration and death camps were homosexuals and disabled people, but they don't get as much attention. What Elizabeth Costello gets at in a round-about fashion, is that we don't treat our mentally handicapped people, those who can barely function either because of defects at birth or accident/illness, by the same philosophy; rather, the real reason we treat cattle like cattle is superiority, only we seem to shy away from saying it openly.

The example of forcing mice and rats through mazes with changing obstacles, or of caged chimpanzees suddenly faced with a puzzle to get their food, highlights our human-centric way of thinking: if the chimp or any other animal fails our tests to prove or disprove intelligence and the ability to think their way through problems, the researchers take this as evidence of their lack - their lack of being able to think. What it really shows is that they are not human, which we already knew, but allows no room for the idea that animals think differently, and in different ways, from us.

A similar thing occurred when the early English colonists came to Australia, and "tested" the Aboriginals by showing them cards of things like trees, and deciding they were stupid because they didn't know the word "tree". Or the test we were shown during my teaching degree, the real test that was given to countless immigrants of black and white drawings of things - tests skewed to a particular culture and way of thinking, things that might be obvious to us but have no place in the life of, say, someone from Bangladesh. They've since realised how ridiculous - and even damaging - such tests really are, and should have ceased using them by now. But we still judge animals by our own standards, not theirs.

About halfway through this book I realised why I felt like I was on familiar ground: it reminded me of Yann Martel's (more recent) n  Beatrice & Virgiln, which also used an allegory of animals for WWII.

There are other ideological issues touched upon, like the humanities, which was less satisfying in the way it was explored (that's the one brought up while she's in Zululand) - it hesitantly touched on Christian missionaries in Africa but failed to really go anywhere, almost as if that were one subject Coetzee was too tired to handle - or I should say his alter-ego in the novel, Elizabeth Costello, who pretty much says, Oh I can't go into this today, I'm too tired. It is a whole other kettle of fish, after all.

By the time we get to her entry in the debate on evil in Amsterdam, it's clear that Elizabeth Costello is starting to lose the plot. She's getting old, and the brush of death is occupying her more than before. Speaking of, I loved the bit about thinking about death, and what happens to our minds, our brains, when we actually conceive of it - I loved it because I've done it many times over my 32 years and it's nice to hear that others do it too, and that they have the same reaction (like falling into a black hole). Comfort in solidarity, right? ;) Of all her speeches, the one I thought the most, if not only, nonsensical was her one on evil and Paul West's novel (because of the nature of so much of the novel, I had to look up Paul West to make sure he really is fictional, because he could just as easily have been a real person, such is the way Elizabeth Costello thinks and talks about him).

Then the final chapter, Elizabeth Costello waiting at the gates of heaven or hell, applying to go through and failing because she's convinced she doesn't believe in anything. I'm not sure what to make of that chapter, it was an oddly organic way to end the story, but unlike the others there was less oratory thinking going on, less rumination, and more description, so that it felt disjointed from the rest. And after all her previous speeches, here finally Elizabeth Costello flounders entirely, her self seeming to come undone as she loses her grounding. I felt sorry for her through most of the book, especially because the way others perceive her (as a bit of a dodder, or an embarrassment in public - she lacks charisma, reads straight from her notes, and in interviews gives practiced, pre-written responses), but at the end I felt annoyed that she seemed completely at a loss for how to stand up for her convictions, and instead simply parroted "I am a writer, it's my job not to have personal beliefs" - which I think is absolute rubbish. That's like saying a journalist is unbiased. Can't be done. I get her point, but I would have thought the opposite: that what makes a writer is their wealth of beliefs, their abundance of ideas that come from believing in certain things.

One thing that can definitely be said for Elizabeth Costello, no matter what your opinions of her lectures, is that it's a thought-provoking book, and one that requires (if not deserves?) a second, even third, reading.

Elizabeth Costello es un libro complejo, ambiguo, contradictorio y atípico sobre una mujer compleja, ambigua, contradictoria y atípica.

No voy a decir que "nos presenta a un personaje que bla bla bla" porque no nos la presenta, nos hace estar con ella en siete u ocho ponencias que imparte o a las que asiste esta rebuscada mujer. Nos hace seguir a Elizabeth desde detrás y nos hace juzgarlo todo de la misma manera que ella lo hace, "sobreanalizando", y fundamentalmente criticando y rechazando lo convencional.
Porque de alguna manera eso es con lo que me quedo de la "novela". Un rechazo total a los tópicos, a los puntos de vista establecidos sobre la figura de la mujer escritora, las diferencias de género, la ficción, la novela en África, las vidas de los animales, el estado actual de las humanidades o el mal. Coetzee expone esto en varios niveles: uno explícito en los discursos que realizan los personajes que dan las ponencias; uno "subtextual"en lo que no dice nadie pero podemos inferir; e incluso uno en la forma, en el estilo de escritura que tiene el libro.

Lo más destacable es en mi opinión el dominio de las palabras y la exactitud que tiene para mostrar lo que le viene en gana, algo que por ejemplo se ve cuando el extraño narrador nos mueve en el tiempo porque no tiene toda la tarde y no le parece interesante.

Quizás muchos lectores se queden fríos e indiferentes al acabar la novela. Se desesperan, ¡no saben la opinión del autor! En definitiva, no sacan nada en claro de la lectura. Pero esto es lo que nos merecemos si pretendíamos hallar un dogma entre las páginas: Coetzee no nos va a arreglar la vida, no nos va a dar un punto de vista, porque no puede, no es nadie para hacerlo. Es esta ambiguedad, esta decisión de esconderse, y de decir que no a las verdades absolutas, la que obtenemos de Elizabeth personaje, y de Elizabeth novela.

Llegado el momento del fin, la duda no ha muerto sino que se ha hecho más fuerte. Coetzee nos ha convertido al agnosticismo.

"puto Coetzee!"