Backlisted - Rerun - Elizabeth Costello by J.M. Coetzee

Episode Date: August 31, 2026

Recorded live in Galway in 2021, we were joined by novelist Mary Costello for a special episode recorded live at Galway International Arts Festival in Ireland. The book we're debating is Elizabeth Costello (2003) by South-African born Nobel Laureate J.M. Coetzee, a novel that politely asks the reader to consider, amongst other matters, animal rights, the power of faith and the limits of fiction itself. Also in this episode, books by two Irish authors: Sally Rooney's novel Beautiful World, Where Are You and John Moriarty’s The Hut at the Edge of the Village, a collection edited by Martin Shaw and published by the Lilliput Press. * To purchase any of the books mentioned in this episode please visit our bookshop at uk.bookshop.org/shop/backlisted where all profits help to sustain this podcast and UK independent bookshops.* For information about everything mentioned in this episode visit www.backlisted.fm*If you'd like to support the show and join in with the book chat, listen without adverts, receive the show early and with extra bonus fortnightly episodes and exclusive writing, become a Patreon at www.patreon.com/backlisted *You can sign up to our free monthly newsletter here  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Two and five Canadians will hear the words, you have cancer. That's why every step and dollar raised matters. On September 19th, join thousands in Toronto for the Princess Margaret Cancer Foundation Walk. Challenge yourself, friends, and family to walk 21 kilometers in support of life-saving research. Together, we can carry the fire and help create a world free from the fear of cancer. Register today at pmcfwalk.ca.ca. Hi, it's Nikki. Hi, it's Andy.

And it's John. And this is another backlisted rerun. What have we got this week? We have this week. We're going back five years to September 2021. And it is... Oh, is the dark days or was it a bit of sunshine in the dark day? Well, no, this is excitingly.

The first time Andy and I had seen each other for 20 months. And it was the first live backlisted we'd record. since before lockdown. So it was memorable. It was also memorable because we were recording it live at the Galway International Arts Festival. And also memorable because it was on a novel by J.M. Kirtseer, Elizabeth Costello.

And the guest was, remarkably enough, Mary Costello, wonderful Irish novelist, author of the Academy Street and the River Capture. And the highlights, I'm going to, because I have listened to it. No spoilers, though, John. despite, no spoilers, but I'm going to say that there is Andy reading from a brilliant bit reading from a novelist that he loves, that's all I'm going to say. And me reading from an Irish philosopher who I'd recently discovered.

And then there is some really high-quality discussion about Kertsia's work. Anyway, so plenty to enjoy in this episode. Okay, and it's a bit of luck because actually over on our Patreon, we are all in our book club. We're all reading Booker Prize winner, one Booker Prize winner every month, which we're calling Posh Bingo. Thanks, Julian Barnes. We are reading J.M. Kurtzier's Booker Prize winning novel, Disgrace. It's why Booker Prize in 1999. It's his second winner.

Five years ago, though, John, since we were in Galway. Ah, that was such a nice trip, everybody. I know you don't want to hear this because you've just tuned into this to listen to a serious discussion of. a novel about a curse. I just want to reminisce about all the nice meals we have while we were over over there. Also, Nikki said, was it during the dark days? It was at the tail end of the second batch of lockdowns. You had to show your passport if you wanted to get in and do anything. That's what I remember. Yeah, we drove across Ireland and then we went to see the Leo Carrack's film, which is it called? Annette. Is that what it's called? Right. I'm going to stop your holiday

reminiscing you can hear more about the holiday if you carry on listening to the podcast and also in books. To be honest, it's not much about the holiday on the podcast. Good. Lots of talk about literature and meaning. And not about Guinness and all the fun you had. No, no Guinness. There's no Guinness in it at all.

Another thing you can hear if you are on the Patreon is a really fantastic episode of our backlisted readers show on the book Capital by Maureen Duffy. and that's with a listener Dan Jenkins. And the next show we've got coming up. We've just recorded it. It's on the book, Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell by Susanna Clark. And that's coming up in a couple of weeks. So lots of great content.

Support us on Patreon. We'd be super grateful. Patreon.com forward slash backlisted. In the meantime, enjoy the sound of several people, not literally whining and dining when you listen to this, but they will be shortly afterwards and they'll be full of life, full of jrude. Aviv. But nevertheless, enjoy this lovely discussion of Elizabeth Costello by J.M. Kurtzai, and we'll see you next time.

Dear Hitch, and welcome to Backlisted, the podcast that gives new life to old books. Today, you find us recording from Galway International Festival in the O'Donoghue Theatre on the campus of the National University of Ireland in the city of Galway. This is our very first time. that we've done on stage in Ireland are backlisted. In fact, it's our first time in front of a live audience since the Proust Christmas special, our Christmas special devoted to all seven of the volumes

of Allerreche de Tamp Perdue by Marcel Proust, which we recorded in the London Library in December 2019. 2019. John and I have not actually seen one another before today for 20 months. I know, right? It's incredible that we would want to be together again, but we do. God, this is good. It's much better than Zoom, isn't it?

Yeah. It's nice to have an audience in the room. So, and we're particularly delighted to be in an academic venue that will have particular resonance for those of you who have read the book that we're here to discuss tonight. But first, we should do some introductions. I'm John Mitchinson.

And I'm Andy Miller. And joining us today is our guest. Mary Costello, round of applause. Welcome, Mary. Mary, have you come far to be here tonight? About a half an hour, a small village called Canvara. Oh, that's playing the local crowd. But you've moved back to...

Yes, I lived in... From Galway originally. From Galway originally, I grew up here and went to Dublin, I was 17, to go to college, and then worked and lived in Dublin for about 30 years and just came back in 2016. Amazing. Mary's short story collection, the China Fact, was first published by Stinging Fly in 2012, and it was nominated for the Guardian First Book Award

and shortlisted for an Irish Book Award. Her first novel, Academy Street, published by Canningate in 2014, won the Irish Book Awards Novel of the Year award and was named overall Irish Book of the Year. It was shortlisted for the International Dublin Literary Award, the cost of first novel prize, the EU Prize for Literature and others,

and has been translated into several languages. Her second novel, The River Covell, Capture was published in 2019 and shortlisted for the Irish Book Awards, the Kerry Group Novel of the Year and the Dalke Novel Award. Mary, we originally planned to discuss an Irish novel here in Galway for Backlisted. Have you chosen an Irish novel for us to discuss? I'm afraid I haven't. I've chosen a book that has an Irish name. actually, Costello or Costello was a very common Irish name, especially in the west of Ireland and in the south. It's Norman originally. But it's written by a South African writer about a character who's from Australia. So we're in several continents. Although there is maybe a kind of a glimmering of an Irish connection in the book because the novelist Elizabeth Costello, the eponymous novelist, has written, which we'll come on to later. We'll, should we fold that into the main?

Yeah, we will. Let's do that. All right, let's do that. John, what have you been reading this week? Okay, I've been reading a remarkable book called A Hut at the Edge of the Village by John Moriarty. It's a collection of the writings of the Irish philosopher, mythographer, theologian, John Moriarty, of whom I knew nothing until very recently. I'm working with a writer called Martin Shaw, who is. the editor of this collection of John Moriarty's writings, and he commended it to me, and I read it,

and it's, I have to say, exactly up my street. The book, what do you need to know about John Moriarty? He, as Paul Durkan says on the back, he is the most outstanding philosopher theologian since Bishop Berkeley, Ireland's most outstanding philosopher theologians since Bishop Berkeley in the 18th century. if you are interested in how autobiography, folklore, myth and theology can be woven into incredibly powerful, suggestive, complex texts.

I would suggest that some time spent in John Moriarty's company is well. He's kind of like Joseph Campbell amped up to the max. He kind of, his book, A Dream Time is probably his most famous, but his autobiography of which I'm going to read a very short passage in a moment, Nostos, and there's a huge amount in this book. This is a very good introduction. I'm going to read a little tiny bit from the introduction. These are not pastoral times we are living in, but prophetic.

We're at a moment when the world, as we understand it, has been turned upside down. The challenge is that there are fewer and fewer people who can interpret such happenings in a deep, soulful way. Moriati can do that. When culture is in a woeful crisis, the insights rarely come from Parliament, senator, committee. They come from the hut at the edge of the village.

So let me just give you a little bit. This is from his autobiography. Lapwings, I remember. My mother lighting the lamp and in the field in front of the house, lapwings calling every call a complaint. Also, it seemed to me. And the wonder was that even when they were being battered by hailstones, they didn't alter their complaints.

They neither lengthened nor deepened them. In all weathers and at all hours of the night, their complaints were as elegant as their crests. What saddened me is that they were so frightened of me. I had only worked to walk into the fields, and they instantly would become a flock of shimmerings, swiftly swerving as they flew, and then as though quenching themselves,

they would land farther off among the rushes where I'd no longer be able to see them. That's what happened this evening. But now, again at nightfall, they had come back to the richer feeding grounds beside the house and that I was glad of because if ours was a house that lapwings could come close to then surely also it was a house that angels would come close to surely tonight they would come close because since darkness had begun to fall this was Christmas Eve and Madeline my older sister

was singing silent night holy night and Chris had brought two bags of turf from the shed and Babs had brought two buckets of water from the well and already its flame perfectly calm the lamp was giving more light than the fire, with its raptures big and small. But lamplight and firelight, that was every night. Tonight was different. Looking at the crib in the deep sill of our front window, I could see that the light of the highest heaven was in our house. It was a night of wonders.

Tonight, all night, the gates of heaven would be open to us, riding animals higher than our horse and wearing glittering vestments not clothes. The three wise men would show us the tracks in the morning, plain as could be we saw them last Christmas morning. And Santa Claus would come and would bring us what we asked for. To Babs, he would bring a blouse, to me, he would bring a game of snakes and ladders, and to Brenda and Phyllis he would bring dolls. And soon we would have supper with current cake.

There was no denying it. It was wonderful. And in a glow of fellow feeling with all our animals, I went out and crossed the yard to the cow's door. Pushing open the door, I looked in, and at first I just couldn't believe what I was seeing. No candles lighting the windows. holly, no crib, no expectation of kings or of angels, no sense of miracles. What I saw was what I would see on any other night, 11 short-horn cows, some of them standing, some of them lying down, some of them eating hay, and some of them chewing the cud, two of them turning to look at me.

Devastated, I had to admit it was an ordinary night in the stall. Coming back across the yard, I looked at the fowl house and the piggery and the darkness, and the silence that had settled on them, couldn't say it more clearly. Christmas didn't happen in the outhouses. Christmas didn't happen to the animals. The animals were left out. And since the animals were left out, so inside me somewhere was I.

Terrific. Andy, what have you been reading? Well, can everyone see what that is? Well, it seemed remiss to be in Ireland. in the week of September the 6th, 2021, because remember this goes on the permanent record, or at least as long as the internet lasts, and not talk about Sally Rooney's new novel,

Beautiful World, Where Are You? We are a long time admirers of Sally Rooney on Battlisted. John talked about normal people when it was very first published on an episode of Battlisted recorded at the end of the road festival. Three years ago. Three years ago.

And we both, John and I both really like her writing and have looked on over the last few years as that book has gone on to sell a million copies with a mixture of admiration and concern. Because the pleasures of that book seem to us to be considerable and literary. and it's passed off into a realm of popular culture far beyond what we could have imagined for it and I think what Sally Rooney herself could have imagined for it.

So as you probably know, this book, this new novel, Beautiful World, Where Are You, which was published this week, has been reviewed absolutely everywhere. I have read no reviews of it because I wanted to read the book with no spoilers and no prejudices and no expectations high or low. And I finished it on the plane on the way over, and I give it five stars, and I thought it was great. There you go. That's the extent of my insight.

I thought it was terrific, and I think it's about all sorts of different things, Beautiful World, Where Are You? But one of the things that it's about, and this is really important, I get the sense that Sally Rooney is putting up with a lot of crap for having become famous in a way beyond her control.

And that's not what she signed up for, but also if she says at any point, as she has done in interviews, I'm not really enjoying this. I'm aware of quite a lot of people going, oh, shut up. Shut up, you knew what you were getting into. Everyone would want to be famous. Everyone will want to be as successful as you are. And it seems to me one of the things that she does in this book

is express the good and the bad sides of that kind of fame. An almost unprecedented fame for a young woman writing the type of books that she writes. And I'm just going to read you a passage that one of the two heroines of this novel, whose name is Alice and who is a novelist, who has become very successful overnight. Where does Sally Rooney get her ideas?

I don't know. I wanted to read this out because it seems to me that you cannot listen to this and think, you lucky thing. Okay, so I'm just going to read it. It's a page. Have I told you I can't read contemporary novels anymore? I think it's because I know too many of the people who write them. I see them all the time at festivals, drinking red wine and talking about who's publishing who in New York.

Complaining about the most boring things in the world. not enough publicity or bad reviews or someone else making more money. Who cares? And then they go away and write their sensitive little novels about ordinary life. The truth is they know nothing about ordinary life. Most of them haven't so much as glanced up against the real world in decades. These people have been sitting with white linen tablecloths laid out in front of them and complaining about bad reviews since 1983.

I just don't care what they think about ordinary people. As far as I'm concerned, they're speaking from a false position when they speak about that. Why don't they write about the kind of lives they really lead and the kind of things that really obsess them? Why do they pretend to be obsessed with death and grief and fascism when really they're obsessed with whether their latest book will be reviewed in the New York Times? Oh, and many of them come from normal backgrounds like mine, by the way. They're not all children of the bourgeoisie.

The point is just that they stepped right out of ordinary life. Maybe not when their first book came out. Maybe it was the third or fourth. But anyway, it was a long time ago. And now when they look behind them, trying to remember what ordinary life used to be like, it's so far away they have to squint. If novelists wrote honestly about their own lives,

no one would read novels. And quite rightly. Maybe then we would finally have to confront how wrong, how deeply philosophically wrong, the current system of literary production really is, how it takes writers away from normal life, shuts the door behind them and tells them again and again how special they are, and how important their opinions must be. And they come home from their weekend in Berlin.

After four newspaper interviews, three photo shoots, two sold-out events, three long, leisurely dinners where everyone complained about bad reviews, and they open up the old MacBook to write a beautifully observed little novel about ordinary life. I don't say this lightly. It makes me want to be sick. The problem with the contemporary Euro-American novel is that it relies for its structural integrity on suppressing the lived realities of most human beings on Earth. Now, you don't get that in... much chick lit.

So I think this book is absolutely terrific. And I applaud and salute Sally Rooney for having the strength of character and the grace under fire to write another terrific and important book living a life that very few people if they actually had to live it would enjoy. So there you go.

Boy, that's a hell of a passage, isn't it? I mean, and massive, a lot of trees. How many people here have read that, Sally Rooney already? Everyone. Wow, that's, that's, everyone here has read it. That is incredible. No, that one person that read it. That gentleman there, I think.

Did you enjoy it? Great. He said, yeah, it was great. There you are two. That's two five-star reviews, right? Very good. John, shall we move on to the main event? Because I think some of the themes in both passages,

our relationship with animals and our relationship with literary culture are absolutely germane to the book that Mary has chosen, which is, as we said, Elizabeth Costello by Jerm Kutzer, published in 2003 by Sackram Woolburton in the UK and Viking in the US. So now this novel is I think I'm spoiling nothing by saying It is quite challenging Mary It has that reputation certainly

But I think in the actual narrative Or the writing of it it's very readable Yeah yeah His prose are incredibly readable I agree So what I've asked John to do John are taken on the challenge Of preparing a description for the audience

He may not have read Normally at this stage In the podcast Our producer Nicky who sadly can't be here night would say what's it about and Andy and I will kind of yeah we'll sort of of her and hum and her yeah so here's here's a paragraph which I'm laying on the table as a as an attempt to say what to answer Nikki's Nicky's question Elizabeth Costello the eponymous hero of the novel is a famous Australian

novelist now in her late 60s and living in that strange otherworldly realm where most of a professional life consists in delivering academic lectures or attending award ceremonies. She is still best known for her fourth novel, The House on Eccles Street, in which she liberated Molly Bloom from her soliloquy and Joyce's Ulysses and gave her new life an agency.

This annoys her. Many things do, cruelty to animals in particular. The novel is divided into eight lessons, that's the subtitle, Elizabeth Costello, eight lessons, rather than chapters, built around eight speeches or lectures which Elizabeth either delivered, or listens to. As David Lodge has written, it is a book which begins like a cross between a

campus novel and a platonic dialogue, segues into introspective memoir and fanciful musing, and ends with a Kafka's bad dream of the afterlife. In other words, it shows J.M. Kirtsea at his enigmatic genre-stretching Nobel Prize-winning best. So does that kind of capture any of it for you? Oh, very much so. Very little. to add to that. Right, our job is done. But we should ask...

Mary, yeah, we should ask... Mary, well, if you are happy with that, then let me ask you, when did you first discover this book? You know, why have you chosen it for us and when did you first encounter it? I think... Cotsay used two of these chapters

in a slim little book. I think it was brought out about 1999 and it was called The Lives of Animals. And he himself had delivered these two lectures at Princeton as part of the Tanner series of lectures. So the two, chapter two and three, the lives of animals philosophers and the lives of animals poets, he delivered those at two lectures in Princeton.

He did that at the Nobel Prize as well. He delivers a story, and it was the first time he had introduced Elizabeth Costello. Then a few years later, he brought out this book, and he added more lectures. And in fact, the one about the evil, the problem of evil, he delivered that lecture at a real conference in Amsterdam on evil as well, the problem of evil. So these are his lectures, but he had constructed the character of Elizabeth Costello some years before that. So the big draw for me, I had read Katsaya before that, the life of times of Michael Kay and maybe one or two others. but I didn't have the same pull until this book. And John Bannville reviewed the lives of animals,

that Slim Book around 1999, I think. And I just rushed out and bought it. Obviously, the surname floored me for a start. I thought, my God, it's like a sign. You feel an instant connection. So I bought that, and the issue of the way she suffers for the lives of animals was what hooked me, to be quite honest with you.

I knew instantly our guest that Katsay himself was concerned with the same issues and had the same sensibilities and sensitivities. And indeed, he's much more public in recent years about how he feels humanity treats animals and each other, of course. Then when the book came out, I was in love with it. I've re-read it several times. And with each reading, I think I said it to in an email. I am, Florida. There are moments. It has a reputation for being very serious. and dry, and there are certainly sections, especially the long dialogue with herself or dialogue with another guest, like the African writer or with her sister who's in none. There are long passages with a lot of logic, you know, but I think that her arguments, like Cuthéas, they're quite clear.

What she does is she self-questions the whole time, and it's really about the examined life. But we do also get a lot about her own life. You know, she has a son and daughter. In the first chapter, we meet her son. So I think that just so that we don't give an impression that it's all dry arguments about moral and ethical issues, there is very much behind it a life lived. She's 66, as you said, she's written a successful book, you know, around Joyce as Uly says, but she's rare a son and a daughter. Her son lives in America, he's an academic, and she visits and stays with him and his wife and children. He's a compassionate son, but he is baffled by his mother. He's he's absolutely perplexed at what he calls her devotion to this animal business.

Shall I just read the very opening of the book? Because I feel like that actually sets up the tone, the character and the subject. And before I do that, I will say I totally agree with you that the presentation of long speeches, not just for their own sake, but have demonstrations of character or characters is one of the tightrope walks that takes place in the novel, I think. And I found totally fascinating.

A lot of the time I couldn't work out why I was so gripped by it because it's quite abstract in places, but yet at the same time you feel a real person is making the case whether you agree with it or not. So John, I'll just read the opening and then I might ask you to build on that.

There is, first of all, the problem of the opening. Namely, how to get us from where we are, which is as yet nowhere to the far bank. It is a simple bridging problem, a problem of knocking together a bridge. People solve such problems every day. They solve them, and having solved them, push on.

Let us assume that, however it may have been done, it is done. Let us take it that the bridge is built and crossed, that we can put it out of our mind. We have left behind the territory in which we were, we are in the far territory where we want to be. Elizabeth Costello is a writer, born in 1928, which makes her 66 years old going on 67.

She has written nine novels, two books of poems, a book on bird life and a body of journalism. By birth, she is Australian. She was born in Melbourne and still lives there, though she spent the years 1951 to 1963 abroad, in England and in France. She has been married twice. She has two children, one by each marriage. Elizabeth Custolo made her name with her fourth novel,

The House on Eccles Street, 1969, whose main character is Marion Bloom, wife of Leopold Bloom, principal character of another novel, Ulysses, 1922 by James Joyce. In the past decade, there has grown up around her a small critical industry. There is even an Elizabeth Costello society based in Albuquerque, New Mexico, which puts out a quarterly Elizabeth Costello newsletter. Now, I have no idea whether there is a J.M. Kirtsea newsletter that was published in 1995. I feel like there must have been. Because how close is this to Kertzaya? I think it's very close.

I mean, just getting back to her character for a minute, she's a very contrary woman at times. She appears contrary. She doesn't really care about what people think any longer. And she's quite isolated because of some of the positions she takes, especially in relation to animals. She's also a woman of great humanity. She has a backbone.

She doesn't avoid the awkward questions. She's not sure what the answers are, but she doesn't avoid the awkward questions. And she, one of the arguments she makes, I think, is for using less reason and maybe more feeling. And that's something you don't really expect from somebody who's arguing philosophical issues. She's arguing for more feeling that, you know,

from Descartes on we've relied too much and we've depended too much on reason rather than feeling or intuition. She's calling for a little bit of that and also for more imagination rather than thought. but yes I think that getting back to Kutsea I think that there's a lot like I said he was he delivered some of these lectures the one of the the books that Elizabeth Costello takes issue with in the in the chapter on evil is a book by Paul West where he's writing about the the July plotters against um against Hitler and she questions whether it is right to represent such evil in fiction that she asks, is the writer of the book, Paul West?

And Paul West is a real writer. And he wrote this poem. I didn't actually know that when I was reading the novel. I only found that when you told me. He is a real writer. And it's a real book that he's writing about. So this is pretty remarkable thing in a novel for a writer to be writing about

delivering a lecture, a critical lecture, about a book where the novelist is in the audience. And that whole, this is such a, in many ways, I think this is quite a miraculous book because it ought not to work, a series of lectures as a fiction ought not to work. But it does because he is technically such a brilliant writer and he knows how to give you enough about a character.

But also, these are the big questions. The things that she cares about, the problem of evil, and she gets into a hot water, she gets terrible accusations of anti-Semitism because she said she basically compares the way we treat animals to the Holocaust. But as you say, Mary, she doesn't care about who she offends. She's got to a certain point in her life

where she's bored with delivering the same. She's been giving the same old lectures for her. So she's got to that point now where she is trying to get to the truth. And I think Kertsia is a novelist who wants to get to the truth, but you don't get to the truth by having an argument. What arguments do give you, though, is drama, and he manages to build the character around the drama of this 67-year-old woman being really fucking annoying at an academic lunch or on a cruise ship going to Antarctica. or, as you say, in their hotel lobby where she tries to tell Paul West

that she's going to diss him and he just totally doesn't, he says nothing. But what I liked about that particular chapter as well, later on we discover she has a very strong position on evil and she says, I don't know if I believe in God,

but I believe in the devil. And she traces it back when she was 19 in university. One night she was picked up by a guy, a sailor or whatever and went back to his flat and had drinks or whatever and then wanted not to sleep with him and he got angry and he beat her up and broke her jaw and left her in a bit and burnt her clothes yeah burnt her clothes tore her clothes and when he fell asleep she went back into the room and took her clothes so it was a she said that that night evil entered her and that when paul west wrote about and a very graphic detail she she talks about when the plotters were being executed. They were taunted by their hangman first or their executioner,

and they were told what was going to happen to them. Their bowels would go. A very graphic description of what was going to happen to them. And she argued that Paul West, by writing that, entered the hangman's mentality and then let the evil loose in his book. And she argues that there are some things beyond evil, like forbidden places, outspeech or whatever.

She said there are some places that maybe it's best for humanity not to go because the genie gets out of the bottle. So however then she described herself, that's what she does because she forces us to listen to what happens to animals and abattoirs. So by the end of the chapter, she's come around to a sort of reconciliation

about where she stands and she is reconciled to what Paul West has done. And she has, in earlier chapters, what she does is she's constantly asking people to imagine the lives of others. That that's why what she calls, there's a Holocaust every day in the abattoirs and in the farming industry. And she says that it's because of the inability of us to imagine the lives of others. And she compares to what happened in Germany and Poland,

that the people around knew something was going wrong, but because of a willed ignorance and an inability to imagine the lived life of another being has led to this. So she herself asks us to consider that, just like Paul West has asked her to consider the evil. And that discussion about what the limits of art are, and what art can represent, and what art shouldn't represent, is very current. I mean, I was really struck when I was reading this novel

that was written 20 years ago in, as you say, a fairly digressive form. how relevant it is to what we would refer to as culture war stuff, although I hate the phrase, but that's what it's about, the idea about whether you can say anything. And if you can say anything,

well, why are you saying it? You need to interrogate what you're saying it. That's people's views who you don't agree with. And that's 20 years before, I mean, that's absolutely where we are at the moment trying to work out how we deal with, But what I love about this book is, where do you think he's going to take us next, readers, after the Problem of Evil in an Amsterdam conference?

Your favorite chapter, I'm sure. It's just suddenly you're in a vision of a sort of purgatorial vision. It's like an Italian village where she's waiting to go up to give what they call a statement. And it turns out that the statement she discovers is more of a confession, really. They want to ask her what she believes in. And she says, I don't believe anything. I'm a writer. I'm there to record.

I'm there to record. I'm there to record. I'm the secretary of the invisible. Milosh's line. And she has, I think, she has two goes at seeing if she can get. They open a door a little bit and she sees some light. She says, is that the light that Dante saw? I don't know.

It looks pretty good. And also, I'm getting bored with being here. It's the most, in terms of a gear shift in a novel. And yet somehow, because of this famous limpidity or whatever you want to call Kurtzier's prose, the precision, you don't throw the book across the room saying that's ridiculous. It's also quite funny that bit because... Oh, it is.

Because Elizabeth Costello, the novelist, reflects to herself, where am I? I mean, oh, this is terrible. It's so literary this purgatory. It's like Kafka. I don't even like Kafka. And then she says, maybe that's the point. Maybe that it's a sort of punishment.

And yet she says that she doesn't like Kafka. But one of the keys of the two animal lessons is the famous ape and the academy. Yeah. The report of the Academy. So maybe you should read some. Okay. I was going to say just before that when you read that opening bit, Andy, it reminded me that it was forecast because he's talking about a bridge. We have to cross over.

And of course, the final chapter is she's crossing over into the afterlife. We're not sure if it's a dream, but she's at the gates of heaven. It's called at the gate. So she's standing there and she has to appear before a court of judges and she has to answer for herself. So it is very much like the gate of heaven. And there's a tribunal of judges who will hear her, what is her belief? And she keeps going back. She fails to tell them what she believes in. But yes, the little bit I was going to read was from an earlier chapter when she's gone to stay with John, her son in Appleton College, which I suppose is the model for Princeton where he really read. She stays with John and his wife Norm and their children, and Norm is an academic as well. And they go to hear her lecture. She's given a big award and they go to hear her lecture. Actually, there's a little bit of a funny bit because John is thinking the first few chapters are from his point of view and he's a very sound

compassionate father and he's caught because Norma, his wife does not like Elizabeth Costello she thinks Norma herself I think teaches philosophy. She does. She's an academic philosopher and really finds her mother-in-law's arguments just flaky. Flaky. Yeah. And so she's staying

at the house and the children are eating at a different table because they eat meat and Elizabeth doesn't, Norma doesn't want them having to not eat meat that night. But at the gala dinner that night, John is thinking, I wonder how are the university going to organize this? Will it be vegetarian in deference to Elizabeth Costello

or will it be the standard fish or whatever? But anyway, later on, she gives this big lecture about how. And the truth is, and I think this is very true of Kutzea as well, she is genuinely wounded and baffled by humanities treatment of animals. She does compare it to the Holocaust and she doesn't apologize for that. And all the language that the Nazis used, she explains that they learned their techniques from the stockyards of Chicago, that the whole model for slaughter in the camps was based on animal slaughter. But because of this position, she does feel isolated, even with family around her.

So this little bit is at the end of the trip and John is bringing her to the airport the following morning. Seven o'clock, the sun just rising and he and his mother are on their way to the airport. I'm sorry about Norma, he says. She has been under a lot of strain. I don't think she's in a position to sympathise. Perhaps one could say the same for me. It's been a short visit. I haven't had time to make sense of why you have become so intense about the animal business. She was a watches the wipers wagging back and forth. A better explanation, she says, is that I have not told you why, and dare not tell you. When I think of the words, they seem so outrageous that they are best spoken into a pillow or into a hole in the ground like King Midas. I don't follow, he said.

What is it you can't say? It's that I no longer know where I am. I seem to me. I seem to move around perfectly easy among people, to have perfectly normal relations with them. Is it possible, I ask myself, that all of them are participating in a crime of stupefying proportions? Am I fantasising it all? I must be mad. Yet every day I see the evidences. The very people I suspect produce the evidence, exhibited, offer it to me. Corpses. fragments of corpses that they have bought for money. It is as if I were to visit friends and to make some polite remark about the lamp in their living room

and they were to say, yes, it's nice, isn't it? Polish Jewish skin it's made of. We find that's best, the skins of young Polish Jewish virgins. And then I go to the bathroom and the soap wrapper says Treblinka, 100% human steward.

great. Am I dreaming? I say to myself, what kind of house is this? Yet I'm not dreaming. I look into your eyes, into Norma's, into the children's, and I see only kindness, human kindness. Calm down, I tell myself, you are making a mountain out of a molehill. This is life. Everyone comes to terms with it. Why can't you? Why can't you? She turns on him a tearful face. What does she want? He thinks. Does she want me to answer her question for her? They are not yet on the expressway. He pulls the car over, switches off the engine, takes his mother in his arms. He inhales the smell of cold cream, of old flesh. There, there, he will. He will. He will. He will. He whispers in her ear. They're there. It will soon be over.

Strong stuff. Not a light read. Well, I, not a light read. No, that's not one of the funny bits, no. When I told Pat McCabe we were doing that, he said, ah, he said, they'll be dancing in the streets of Galway tonight. We've got a couple of audio clips of Kurtzaiar talking, and they're quite, they're quite long. They're longer than we normally do,

but that's because he speaks very carefully and with relative precision so he can follow the thought through to the end. So I'd like to play something now, which is him being interviewed in the year 2000, presumably while he was writing after the success of disgrace, which was the second of his novels to win the Booker Prize, but before the publication of Elizabeth Costello

and before he'd won the Nobel Prize literature. This is Kurtzaiar talking about the satisfactions of writing. Writing in itself as an activity is neither beautiful nor consoling. Its industry has its own pleasures, which are the pleasures of total engagement, hard thought, verifiable activity, verifiable results, productiveness. Beauty and consolation belong not to the activity, but to the results of the results of the that activity. The book you write may or may not be, have beautiful prose. Having written the book, being able to look back on having completed the book, may or may not be consoling. But writing the book is quite different. Work. Yes, it's good work. Because one isn't in writing,

transforming the world into the world as it should be that would be too much of a task if one undertook it every time no I think that grasping the world as it is putting it within a certain frame

taming it to a certain extent that is quite enough of an ambition what do you think There's no doubt about it. He's a very disciplined, hardworking man, intensely private, very reserved. And I think, you know, in his own personal life he has suffered some tragedies throughout his life. So I'm pretty sure he, you know, gives it a lot of thought and is very serious and very aesthetic as well. You know, he doesn't drink or eat meat. He cycles or he used to. I don't know. whether he does now.

Why I do like him so much is he is one of the artists who truly lives his work in the sense that his sensitivities pour into the work. I came across an interview. He doesn't give many interviews now, but he gave some in the 90s to David Atwell, Katsien Scholar, who's written a few books, but doubling the point is one of his older ones.

And I came across this little quote, which he put in parentheses. He was talking about something else. You can see he uses quite a detached tone. He speaks about one all the time. He doesn't often speak in the personal eye. He said, let me add that I, as a person, as a personality, am overwhelmed by the fact of suffering in the world.

My thinking is thrown into confusion and helplessness by the fact of suffering in the world and not only human suffering. These fictional constructions of mine are paltry, ludicrous defenses against being overwhelmed. So I think that he put that in parentheses, and I think that's why he writes. He's overwhelmed by the suffering of the world, and he writes to keep from being overwhelmed.

It's a defense against being overwhelmed. He also is incapable. As you say, he's such a deeply intelligent writer. I don't think any writer that I know of has quest what fiction is for, what stories are for, are they for consolation? It's all his work, and he can't allow himself, it seems to me, to just to be directly identified with a character. He does that thing, as you say, he delivers, even in the animal lectures he was using

Elizabeth Costello as a sort of fictional, as a fictional sort of baffle to keep. I don't think it was he was trying to hide. but I just think he thinks just saying what you think isn't enough. And I think he was very aware that he's writing a work of literature anyway. And he said in some of these interviews as well, all writing is autobiographical, fiction and nonfiction, because it comes out of the self. In fact, the writing writes the writer, he says.

And one of the, you know, he writes a lot of essays as well for the New York Review of books and he's a few collections of essays, Stranger Shores and Inner Working. And there's one where he reviews a book by Robert Musil, the Austrian early 20th century. I think five women or three women is the title. One of the things he says is that Musil, if I can think of it correctly now, Musil uses fiction as a laboratory for the refinement of the soul. Now, I was thinking it could be applied to Katsaya. Usesia, uses fiction as a laboratory for the refinement of the soul.

And Elizabeth Costello, though, she says, she says, she does. doesn't know if she believes in God. She uses the word soul a lot. At the end of the book, we're at the gaiter, an afterlife. There's a lot that, you know, the frogs have a beingness. There's a lot of reference to what could be regarded traditionally as religious themes, but they're secular in his writing, I think. I mean, the frogs, because that's another, I mean, the book ends with it.

Well, it doesn't end. You know, you think it's at the end, and then there's a postscript, which we may or may not have time to get to. but like I say, it is like such a complicated set of refracting mirrors because he's trying, it seems to me, to say that truth is complex and never simple. Trust the tale, not the teller. I sound like an obsessive and I sort of am.

I went to see him. I went to see him. He came to Listolwriters' Week in 2006, actually, in summer's evening and I was driving. My then boyfriend was with me and I was driving into the town. And I was just driving along like this, and there he was in the footpath. And I, you know, braked suddenly. And I really, I said, he was walking along in a kind of a grey bomber jacket,

and he was talking to what looked like a teenage girl. And it was really astonishing. It was so incongruous to see this man on the street of an ordinary Irish town, a market town in the south of Ireland, that, you know, the kind of a place I've grown up in myself, he was walking along. He was giving a lecture or reading that evening in the hotel, the glistole arms and you know it was a big big conference room and I was very wanted to be there early set a few rows back and it's full of eagerness and everything and he read it's very very

polite and gracious and he read very in a very softly spoken voice and my boyfriend at the time did not like the writing and did not like the man I could tell and he was getting increasingly impatient beside me and you know he hadn't read the work or anything and I was getting very nervous and leaning and, you know, trying to hold on to every word, this soft-spoken author was saying. Meanwhile, he was getting edgier and edgier and I was petrified he would get up and walk out or something, but I still, you know, think about that and I think, ah, I'm glad I went, you know, it was one of those moments where it's one of those, this novel, you know, the vocation of the writer, one of the things I really enjoyed about this novel is it made me think

the writer Matthew DeBatio I was at an event where I asked him, did he enjoy doing events like the one we're doing today in fact, or like the one Kurtzscheer you attended with Kurtzscheer and he said, well

the writer is the guy who stays home and does the work and the author is the guy who goes out and does this crap and I wanted to just read a little bit from the chapter, the novel

in Africa, which is set on a cruise ship, where authors are paid to go out and address passengers on a cruise liner about the state of the novel, so you would buy your ticket and you'd have five days of sailing around

with Elizabeth Costello, and in this case an African rise called Immanuel Igoudou. And I wanted to read this one paragraph because it reminds me of the section from Sally Rooney's novel that I read at the start of the podcast, and it's not often that Sally Rooney gets compared to J.M. Kurtzah, but I'm going to do it. Iguidu is in the ballroom on the cruise ship, and he's saying to the audience, who've paid

hundreds of pounds, euro or dollars to attend, how easy do you think it is, ladies and gentlemen, for this fellow to be true to his essence as writer when there are all these strangers to please? month after month publishers, readers, critics, students all of them armed not only with their own ideas about what writing is or should be, what the novel

is or should be, what Africa is or should be but also about what being pleased is or should be do you think it is possible for this fellow to remain unaffected by all the pressure

on him to please others, to be for them what they think he should be, to produce for them what they think he should produce. You know, I felt that was a, one of the, I simultaneously thought, well, that's another creed occur. Yes. But then I thought, but I've got no guarantee, that's what Kurtzai thinks. And I wanted to ask both of you, you know, you've talked about Elizabeth Costa. Stello's strong views.

Now, we know some of them are Kurtzai's strong views, but are they all Kurtzai's strong views? Is she a simple proxy for him? I think that he has indicated in interviews that her concerns are his concerns. But for instance, that discussion about evil, she started out at one position and she worked her way through. And he said in another interview, fiction is not free expression.

It's dialogic. It means that the writers is awakening the counter voices within himself, the counter voices. So he's writing to know what he thinks. John Didion said this. I write to know what I think. But he never starts out. I think most writers would feel this. We write to know what we want to say.

We're writing towards something. fiction and nonfiction you start out and you're writing towards something, some it and we don't know exactly what it is and in the teasing out of that and that's what Elizabeth Costa is doing she's having an argument with self

she's having an argument with others and it's what Katsaya I think does and what a lot of writers doing they're writing to get to something you know I used to think it was writing to put your finger on the nub of things and the nub of something

to get to the heart of something But I think actually, certainly when I think about it, I think it's to write towards consciousness, to be more conscious. And in a way, that's what she is doing. She's being more conscious about suffering or what's the purpose. By the end of that story in the very last chapter at the gate, she's asking, was it worthwhile being a writer at all? Is art any good? And Katsaya has that argument a lot. What is the point of writing?

What's the point of art? at one point she says I think might be in the African chapter with the African writer if I had a choice between writing all those novels and doing good I would choose doing good I would like to

before we have to wind up in about five minutes but I would like to say a little bit about Kertzai's parents and I would also like to play this This is a very short speech Kaseya gave at the dinner, at which he received the Nobel Prize for Literature. And the day before, he delivered quite an esoteric Nobel laureate speech.

And so people were geared up for a second installment of something similar. And instead, they got this. Your Majesty's, Your Royal Highnesses, ladies and gentlemen, distinguished guests, friends. The other day, suddenly out of the blue, while we were talking about something completely different, my partner, Dorothy, my friend and companion, burst out as follows. the other hand she said on the other hand how proud your mother would have been

what a pity she isn't still alive and your father too how proud they would have been of you even prouder than of my son the doctor I said even prouder than of my son the professor even prouder if my mother was still alive I said she would be 99 and a half. She would probably have senile dementia.

She would not know what was going on around her. But of course, I missed the point. Dorothy was right. My mother would have been bursting with pride. My son, the Nobel Prize winner. And for whom, anyway, do we do the things that lead to Nobel Prizes, if not for our mothers. Mommy, mommy, mommy, I won a prize.

That's wonderful, my dear. Now eat your carrots before they get cold. Why must our mothers be 99 and long in the grave before we can come running home with a prize that will make up for all the trouble we have been to them? To Alfred Nobel, 107 years in the grave, and the foundation that so faithfully administers his will, and that has created this magnificent evening for us,

my heartfelt gratitude, to my parents, how sorry I am that you cannot be here. Thank you. Can I read this little bit? Do you want to just tell us what, what you've got for us, because it seems like a nice note to end on. Yeah. Cotsayer wrote three books, boyhood, youth and summertime,

which are variously called memoir and fiction. He himself said they hover between memoir and fiction. Some call them autobiographical fiction, fictional autobiography and so on. But this is probably my favorite one, and he's written it about his childhood. He grew up in Cape Town, South Africa. his father was a lawyer who was struck off for malpractice and fought in the Second World War in Italy

and his mother was a very loving mother, perhaps what nowadays we might call this, mother a little bit like Beckett's mother in some of the sense in that she invested a lot in her two sons and loved them dearly and was very forward for them. But he loves her dearly, but he often uses her. And the thing about these memoir books is he was searingly honest, brutally honest.

We don't know if every single thing is true because it hovers between memoir and fiction. But in this, he describes, he had to write an essay in school one day. He's maybe 10 or 12 about what he did this morning. And he lied in it. He said he polished his shoes, he did. But his mother does everything for him.

But he lied about it and felt very guilty afterwards. He is a liar, and he is cold-hearted too, a liar to the world in general cold-hearted towards his mother. It pains his mother he can see that he is steadily growing away from her. Nevertheless, he hardens his heart and will not relent. His only excuse is that he is merciless to himself too. He lies, but he does not lie to himself. When are you going to die?

He asks her one day, challenging her, surprised at his own daring. I am not going to die, she replies. She speaks gaily, but there is something false in her gaiety. What if you get cancer? You can only get cancer if you are hit on the breast. I won't get cancer. I live forever. I won't die. He knows why she is saying this. She is saying it for him and his brother, so that they will not worry. It is a silly thing to say, but he is grateful to her forehead. He cannot imagine her dying. She is the firmest thing in his life. She is the rock on which she stands. Without her, he would be nothing. She guards her breasts carefully in case they are not. His very first memory, earlier than the dog, earlier than the scrap of paper, is of her white breasts.

he suspects he must have hurt them when he was a baby beaten them with his fists oh it's so good I would like to say one of the wonderful things about Battleston which we've seen really demonstrated this evening is the magic when a writer reads the work of a writer they love

you know Mary you read both those passages so beautifully I think I think Kurt Zaheir should outsource his readings to you. That's all we've got time for, I'm afraid. I want to just thank Mary for choosing such a, I think a wonderful, challenging, ultimately, deeply rewarding book. I hope we've captured some of the flavour of it.

It is in no sense a dry academic recycling of philosophical themes. It's a real novel and one that will live with readers for a long, long time. I also want to thank the amazing Galway Festival team, Paul Fai, the director, Kirstie, Warren, Jacinta Dyer and Tracy Ferguson, who've looked after us, invited us and looked after us brilliantly. Thank you. It's amazing to be here. Yeah, for more from Galway International Arts Festival, you can check out their podcast, First Thought, and that's available on all major podcast platforms. And then after you've done that, you can download all 140. previous episodes of Batlisted. 145. Plus follow links, clips and suggestions for further reading

by visiting our website at batlisted.fm. You can also share your love by directly supporting us on Patreon at patreon.com forward slash backlisted. All the patrons who subscribe get to hear backlisted episodes early and for the price of two pints of Guinness at Morins on the Weir to extra podcasts a month. Well, thank you. Mary Costello.

John, do you want to say goodnight? Slomberfall and hi-hawar. Thank you and good night.