伊丽莎白·科斯特洛：八堂课 (2003)

Elizabeth Costello

小说虚构作品

作者: 约翰·马克斯维尔·库切
首版: 2003 年
Open Library: 26 个版本

百科

《伊丽莎白·科斯特洛：八堂课》（Elizabeth Costello）是一部由南非作家约翰·马克斯韦尔·库切所写的小说。于2004年4月由浙江文艺出版社出版的图书。

In this novel, Elizabeth Costello, a celebrated 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 fragments that Coetzee had previously published. The lessons she delivers only tenuously speak to the work for which she is being honored. Of note, 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 and Coetzee's 2011 short story Lies is about a woman with the last name Costello.

Summary

A renowned writer, Elizabeth Costello has to put up with a large number of various inconveniences. She is a sixty-six-year-old woman who has committed all her life to writing, often neglecting not only her own needs but her children in order to give all her strengths to her work. Due to the fact that her first novel is about women's liberation, her interviewers – usually women who write books about her – expect that she will be an energetic fighter for equality, who eagerly discusses the importance of a woman's role in modern society. They are extremely disappointed to see an elderly woman, who is sick and tired of discussing her first book.

Accompanied by her son John, she travels to Pennsylvania to receive the Stowe Award. During her acceptance speech, she speaks about Kafka and the audience finds it difficult to follow her idea, for this kind of talk is not to their liking. It seems that there is a gap between her and her audience. Although public speaking becomes a challenge for her, she decides to take a cruise in which she is supposed to speak about realism. The applause she gets is unenthusiastic.

Not only does the public not understand what she wants them to realize, but neither does her own family. Elizabeth's vegetarianism often provokes quarrels between her and her daughter-in-law. Her son is torn between love for his mother and difficulties in accepting her point of view. More often than not, he asks himself why she can't be just like any other elderly woman. The truth is that she doesn't know the answer herself. She speaks about the things people don't want to know, because she feels the need to do it.

Elizabeth has a sister she hasn't seen for a long period of time. She lives in Africa and serves in the Marian Order. The sisters have very little in common. During a graduation ceremony that both sisters are invited to, Blanche criticizes the humanities. Their parting is bitter, for they know they will not see each other again. Blanche charges Elizabeth with choosing "the wrong Greeks", meaning that Blanche doesn't support the philosophical ideas her sister is so fond of.

At the end of the novel, Elizabeth finds herself in a kind of limbo, which she can only escape by satisfactorily explaining her beliefs before a court. It's implied this is a purgatory-like stage of the afterlife. Her first attempt is a failure, for she tells the truth and states that she doesn't believe in anything. She then has another try, where she tells a fictional story that reveals a deeper appreciation of life, but the novel ends before she finds out whether she will succeed at passing through the gate.

以上文字摘自英文维基百科「Elizabeth Costello」（有删节，去掉了参考文献等尾部小节），按 CC BY-SA 4.0 使用，作者为维基百科的各位编者。