Product Description

The idea of human cruelty to animals so consumes novelist Elizabeth Costello in her later years that she can no longer look another person in the eye: humans, especially meat-eating ones, seem to her to be conspirators in a crime of stupefying magnitude taking place on farms and in slaughterhouses, factories, and laboratories across the world.

Costello's son, a physics professor, admires her literary achievements, but dreads his mother's lecturing on animal rights at the college where he teaches. His colleagues resist her argument that human reason is overrated and that the inability to reason does not diminish the value of life; his wife denounces his mother's vegetarianism as a form of moral superiority.

At the dinner that follows her first lecture, the guests confront Costello with a range of sympathetic and skeptical reactions to issues of animal rights, touching on broad philosophical, anthropological, and religious perspectives. Painfully for her son, Elizabeth Costello seems offensive and flaky, but--dare he admit it?--strangely on target.

Here the internationally renowned writer J. M. Coetzee uses fiction to present a powerfully moving discussion of animal rights in all their complexity. He draws us into Elizabeth Costello's own sense of mortality, her compassion for animals, and her alienation from humans, even from her own family. In his fable, presented as a Tanner Lecture sponsored by the University Center for Human Values at Princeton University, Coetzee immerses us in a drama reflecting the real-life situation at hand: a writer delivering a lecture on an emotionally charged issue at a prestigious university. Literature, philosophy, performance, and deep human conviction--Coetzee brings all these elements into play.

As in the story of Elizabeth Costello, the Tanner Lecture is followed by responses treating the reader to a variety of perspectives, delivered by leading thinkers in different fields. Coetzee's text is accompanied by an introduction by political philosopher Amy Gutmann and responsive essays by religion scholar Wendy Doniger, primatologist Barbara Smuts, literary theorist Marjorie Garber, and moral philosopher Peter Singer, author of Animal Liberation. Together the lecture-fable and the essays explore the palpable social consequences of uncompromising moral conflict and confrontation.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #42704 in Books
• Published on: 2001-07-01
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 130 pages

From Publishers Weekly
The audience of the 1997-98 Tanner Lectures at Princeton probably expected South African novelist Coetzee to deliver a pair of formal essays similar to those on censorship he presented in Giving Offence. Instead, he gave his listeners fiction: a philosophical narrative about an imaginary feminist novelist, Elizabeth Costello, and the lectures she reads at the fictional Appleton College on the subject of animal rights. Platonic in structure and coolly tight-lipped in style, Coetzee's two stories, "The Philosophers and the Animals" and "The Poets and the Animals," mirror the sometimes acrimonious exchanges in academic debate. While Coetzee is on Costello's side, he does not make her infallible; she is not only uncompromising and sometimes rude, but also an extremist in her antirationalism and an occasionally muddled reasoner. The Appleton professors score intellectual points off her even as she implores them to open their hearts to animals. Coetzee's fictional gambit makes it awkward for the real-life scholars who respond to him in the ultimate section of the book, "Reflections." The criticisms of literary critic Marjorie Garber, bioethicist Peter Singer, religious scholar Wendy Doniger and primatologist Barbara Smuts seem redundant after the overdetermined self-criticism of the novel.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Kirkus Reviews
Fluent, challenging lectures on the ethics that shape the human-animal relationship, from South African novelist and essayist Coetzee (The Master of Petersburg, 1994, etc.). Princeton's Tanner Lectures are usually philosophical essays exploring human values. Here Coetzee subverts that formula by shaping his talks into fictional lectures given by an elderly novelist, Elizabeth Costello, on ``an enterprise of degradation, cruelty, and killing which rivals anything that the Third Reich was capable of'': our treatment of animals. It is now an old and troubling notion, this analogy between the death camps and the meat business, but it is compelling for Costello: she is troubled by our willed ignorance of the past and present existence of slaughterhouses, the sickness of soul that denies any creature the sensation of being alive, our poverty of sympathetic imagination. ``The horror is that the killers refused to think themselves into the place of their victims . . . They do not say `How would it be if I were burning?' . . . In other words, they closed their hearts.'' Coetzee is obviously aware of the potential noxiousness of this terrain (the poet Abraham Stern scorns Costello's use of the analogy: ``You misunderstand the nature of likenesses; I would even say you misunderstand willfully, to the point of blasphemy''), and he uses it with provocative intent. Self-evident, though, is our collective failure of nerve (Thomas Aquinas through Descartes and Kant to today) to unleash ``the extent to which we can think ourselves into the being of another.'' Perhaps, Coetzee implies, rational thought, lagging behind sympathy, will follow its lead if powerful fictions and images can trigger our fellow feelings. Coetzee takes no prisoners; there is always suffering on the road to salvation. That includes Costello's painful relationship with her son, a terrain so emotionally arid it makes the skin crawl. Included are four commentariesby literary theorist Marjorie Garber, philosopher Peter Singer, religious scholar Wendy Doniger, and primatologist Barbara Smutsthat add touchwood, and a measure of windiness, to Coetzee's ethical tinderbox. -- Copyright ©1999, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Nature neuroscience
I found the book deeply disturbing. . . . [It] offers a passionate and compelling look at one side of the debate.

Customer Reviews

Creative Context for Animal Rights Review
This small book provides a wonderfully insightful perspective on the issues surrounding compassion and respect for animals. It reviews some of the main arguments, but in the context of two lectures given by an aging academician. Adding to the substance of her lectures is the curious passive nature of her son's response, who seems to miss the point, while mainly experiencing a sense of discomfort and embarrassment at the actions of his mother. This is very readable and is intelligently written.

Well written and thought provoking
It's not very traditional, and stylistically it reminds me a good deal of novels by Calvino, Sontag, Kundera, etc. that don't necessarily have a standard narrative. The lectures and debate take up most of the story, but it is not like reading non-fiction. I disagree with criticisms that Coetzee is disguising his own lectures, mostly because I don't think he could have accomplished the same thing as a non-fiction piece. I found the ideas about reason and literature interesting, and was drawn in by the debate offered on the treatment of animals.

This main part of the book also appears as 2 chapters within Coetzee's novel, Elizabeth Costello, which is where I read it. Although I enjoyed E.C., it was the material also published as The Lives of Animals that was most interesting to me. But for more about the main character in The Lives of Animals, you could buy Elizabeth Costello to begin with. (Though then you would not get the introduction or the reflections that appear in The Lives...).

Excellent Narrative Outweighs Boring Commentary
I picked up The Lives of Animals by J.M. Coetzee on a whim while browsing the "Literature" section at Borders; it stood out to me in the way small books by big authors always do.

I will spare anyone reading this review a synopsis of the book other than to say it is split into three sections: The first two, written by Coetzee, are excellent and well written narratives interjected into a light fictional story; the third section is a boring "we're telling you what you just read" section that is not needed, especially given that Coetzee's audience is intended to be well educated. Perhaps it is just my personal preference, but I always scoff at these follow-ups.

The only real negative aspect of the written book is not even relevant to Coetzee's work, but I must subtract a star because the "Reflections" section comprises nearly half of The Lives of Animals. I must also subtract another star because of the pricing due to this fact - this is really only a roughly 60 page story yet is priced the same as a good 300-plus page novel.

Five-star writing by Coetzee outweighs the flaws of this book (largely credited to the publisher, I suspect) in the end, and if you don't care about book prices, and/or are interested in the subject matter, it is a good read. But the book is being reviewed, not J.M. Coetzee, and it gets three stars.