Vox Poetica

Machado de Assis La Revue Littéraire James Wood reviews ‘Elizabeth Costello’ by J.M. Coetzee · LRB 23 October 2003 There may be many readers who, on hearing of J.M. Coetzee’s Nobel Prize, immediately thought about the cost of clarity. There is so much, after all, missing from Coetzee’s distinguished books. His prose is precise, but blanched; in place of comedy there is only bitter irony (this is Coetzee’s large difference from Beckett, whom he so clearly admires); in place of society, with its domestic and familial affiliations, there is political society; and underfoot is often the tricky camber of allegory, insisting on pulling one’s step in certain directions. So Coetzee’s latest book, a series of philosophical dialogues bound into rather fitful fiction, might initially seem unappetising. Coetzee, by contrast, read a story about Elizabeth Costello, who – in the fiction – had been invited to Amsterdam to talk about the problem of evil. Elizabeth Costello collects eight of these tales – ironically called ‘lessons’ in Coetzee’s subtitle. She is not an idea.

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