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Article: Countering the obscene.(Elizabeth Costello)(Book Review)
- Article from:
- The New Leader
- Article date:
- November 1, 2003
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 2003 American Labor Conference on International Affairs. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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Elizabeth Costello By J.M. Coetzee Viking. 230 pp. $21.95.
IT IS APPARENT to anyone who has written one novel and intends to write another that the accomplishments of the first infringe, sometimes cruelly, on the conception of the second. Like an action painting, a book is an event in the writer's life fed by energies that, not surprisingly, ebb and flow. This might explain why the winner of the 2003 Nobel Prize for Literature, J.M. Coetzee, has followed the shattering emotional effects of Disgrace, his most recent novel, with the exceedingly cool intellectual pleasures of Elizabeth Costello. The bombs that explode, figuratively, in Disgrace, would be sufficient ...