Without Lifting A Finger

Ein Brief (also called "Letter of Lord Chandos to Lord Bacon") is a fictitious letter written by the Austrian writer Hugo von Hofmannsthal. Gutenberg has the entire letter in German: http://gutenberg.spiegel.de/buch/997/1 Here is the section of the letter (it's jpeg thus a bit blurry) that prefaces Coetzee's postscript (another fictitious letter authored by Coetzee--or is it Coetzee's Costello--and titled "Letter of Elizabeth, Lady Chandos, to Francis Bacon): And here is Coetzee's translation (presumably): At such moments even a negligible creature, a dog, a rat, a beetle, a stunted apple tree, a cart track winding over a hill, a mossy stone, counts more for me than a night of bliss with the most beautiful, most devoted mistress. These dumb and in some cases inanimate creatures press toward me with such fullness, such presence of love, that there is nothing in range of my rapturous eye that does not have life. It is as if everything, everythi...

Is Coetzee cryptically admitting regret for writing some of his darker books, e.g., In The Heart of the Country ? And wouldn't it have been better to simply "come out with it" instead of beating up on Mr. West?    Yet she does the same kind of thing, or used to. Until she thought better of it, she had no qualms about rubbing people's faces in, for instance, what went on in abattoirs. And from Lesson 8: At the Gate , a couple of quotes. To get through the gate you must state your beliefs:    Belief. Is that all? Not a statement of faith? What if I do not believe? What if I am not a believer? Defending herself as a writer (which doubles as a defense for unbelief):    I am a writer, and what I write is what I hear. I am a secretary of the invisible, one of many secretaries over the ages. That is my calling: dictation secretary. It is not for me to interrogate, to judge what is given me. I merely write down the words and ...

Lesson 6: The Problem of Evil . Ok, but not my fave chapter: traverses an age-old subject and doesn't turn up much that is new (I mean Hannah Arendt new). One bit I dog-eared (also threw a Howgarthian line in with an exclamation mark) because I liked it so much (especially if I could widen its scope). The underlining is mine:    The routine censorship paper is liberal in its ideas, with perhaps a touch of the Kulturpessimismus  that has marked her thinking of late:  the civilization of the West is based on belief in unlimited and illimitable endeavour; it is too late for us to do anything about that, we must simply hold on tight and go wherever the ride takes us. It is on the subject of the illimitable that her opinions seem to be undergoing a quiet change. Reading West's book has contributed to that change, she suspects, though it is possible the change would have happened anyway, for reasons that are more obscure to her. ...

Ok, I'm in Chapter 3: The Lives of Animals. I guess I knew this before (read it in a review): each chapter hinges on the main character Elizabeth Costello and a speech or speeches she is giving (supposedly real speeches once delivered by Coetzee). Chapter 1: A speech she gives on Realism (in which a story by Kafka figures in: "A Report to an Academy"); Chapter 2: A speech she gives on a cruise ship titled "The Future of the Novel" (an African writer gives a speech too: "The Novel in Africa"); and Chapter 3: Returning to Kafka's ape (Red Peter), and again meeting up with her son (he was absent from Chapter 2), she delivers a speech comparing our handling of animals (factory farms, drug-testing labs, abattoirs = slaughterhouses) to the Third Reich's handling of Jews and other "undesirables." * Here's Coetzee attacking reason (with reason I presume) in Chapter 3:    How is it that humankind throws up, generation after generatio...

I know: more Coetzee. Haven't I almost emptied his oeuvre? Elizabeth Costello (why do I keep thinking Elvis Costello) is again Coetzee in woman's guise; the son is another avatar of Coetzee; the narrator directs them both; but of course all of this is an oversimplification. Taking another stab at it, maybe it'd be better to say: Coetzee's creations with a few appendages/characteristics of Coetzee thrown in? Elizabeth Costello is a famous author who's not so impressive close-up (i.e., she's human); her son (at least in chapter one) is her travel companion. * Anyway, little to say since I've only started. Maybe that I'm reminded a bit of Summertime . And the landscape (or at least Elizabeth's landscape) is Australia not South Africa. When did Coetzee move to Australia?