Elizabeth Costello
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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Elizabeth Costello is a 2003 novel by South African-born Nobel Laureate J. M. Coetzee.
In this novel, Elizabeth Costello, an aging Australian writer, travels around the world and gives lectures on topics including the lives of animals and literary censorship. In her youth, Costello wrote The House on Eccles Street, a novel that re-tells James Joyce's Ulysses from the perspective of the protagonist's wife, Molly Bloom. Costello, becoming weary from old age, confronts her fame, which seems further and further removed from who she has become, and struggles with issues of belief, vegetarianism, sexuality, language and evil.
Many of the lectures Costello gives are edited pieces that Coetzee previously published. Elizabeth Costello is the main character in Coetzee's academic novel, The Lives of Animals (1999). A character named Elizabeth Costello also appears in Coetzee's 2005 novel Slow Man.
