J M Coetzee - Elizabeth Costello

With Waiting for the Barbarians, this makes two of two Coetzee books that I've raced through and yet haven't wholeheartedly liked (or, in the case of Barbarians, liked at all). It's engaging, but many of the responses it engages in me are negative, starting from its central gambit of being a book about a writer and progressing from there. That said, I'm certainly glad that I read Elizabeth Costello, and I feel that doing so has made me a better person (which is certainly not true of all books, nor even of all 'literature', that I get through) - it is a very humanistic book, honestly and sparely engaged in interrogating itself and its own ideas (ie, being what a book about a writer should be). Yeah, thinking about it more doesn't shed any more light on what it's actually 'about', but does somehow reveal more of the text ('novel' is strictly accurate, I reckon, but the term doesn't quite feel accurate) anyway. Yeah, I liked it...so maybe the jury remains out on Coetzee after all.