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Slow Man (2005), a novel about migration, dislocation, and belonging, marks Coetzee's withdrawal from the socio-political landscapes of South Africa coinciding with his move to Australia, and his preoccupation in writing fiction with the conflicting demands of representation, auto/biography, and realism. The leg amputation and home nursing of the protagonist, Paul Rayment, following an accident, introduce a discourse on the various meanings of care and the ethics of caring that also acknowledges Rayment's corporeal enfeeblement, aging, and mortality. An intersecting meta-commentary generated by Rayment's dialogue with the metafictional character Elizabeth Costello complicates Coetzee's \"compromised resilient narrative\" of Rayment's hesitant trajectory of resistance, adaptation, and renewal. The focus on the migrant's place in the life of the nation, represented by Rayment's French origins and his recently arrived Slovakian carer, Marijanna Jokić and her family, represents a new departure for Coetzee.

Premiered at the 2024 Adelaide Festival, Is This the Gate? is an opera excerpt composed by Nicholas Lens and set to a libretto written by J. M. Coetzee. It is adapted from the last section of Coetzee’s novel Elizabeth Costello (2003), revolving around the eponymous character’s trial before the gate in the afterworld. This article explores the literary, musical and dramaturgical elements of Is This the Gate? and contends that the adaptation, despite its brevity and incompleteness, indexes and reworks some of the most important intertexts, localities and motifs that connect Coetzee’s early and late works. Allusions to Kafka and Dante frame the scenario for Costello in limbo—a state mirroring a writer’s late-in-life predicament—while references to Australia’s weather and fauna reflect Coetzee’s relationship to his South African roots and adopted home. Further, Costello’s conviction that she is “a secretary of the invisible” holds clues to Coetzee’s deployment of voices and fictional personae since his debut, Dusklands (1974). The last few acts of the opera excerpt evoke themes of desire and mortality that chime with Coetzee’s other Costello narratives, including his latest collection, The Pole and Other Stories (2023). The adaptation ends with Costello’s declaration of her subjectivity, which suggests a writer’s yearning and resolution to go beyond the threshold of life and death.

The novel “Elizabeth Costello,” by the writer J. M. Coetzee contains the chapter “At the Gate,” in which there is a description of Costello’s judgment. At the end of her life, she needs to write a final statement on her own beliefs. She is in front of the gate and wants to cross it. Costello keeps her position that a writer must not have fixed beliefs, but provisional beliefs. This article aims to analyze the role of a writer, the writer’s provisional beliefs, negation, the freedom a writer has in literature, and the abandonment of belief and incredulity, using the framework provided by Blanchot, Derrida, and Merleau-Ponty. After many attempts to cross the gate, Costello sees the other gate’s side, but because of the inquietude of special fidelities, her crossing is unreliable.

The South African writer John Maxwell Coetzee is well-known for references to animals in his fiction, also given the fact that he and one of his well-known characters, Elizabeth Costello, raise awareness of the cruelty enacted on animals. Many studies have been conducted on Coetzee’s animals, but less attention has been placed on the settings and landscapes in which the animals are situated. Hence, this study aims at understanding the role of the landscapes surrounding the animals via an ecocritical approach. The paper focuses on Coetzee’s fiction featuring Elizabeth Costello, namely, The Lives of Animals (1999), Elizabeth Costello: Eight Lessons (2003), Slow Man (2005), and Moral Tales (2017) by identifying the animals and by discussing the related settings and landscapes. The research concludes that, despite the presence of several animals, there are almost no references to animals in pristine habitats, that most of the animals are in anthropized settings, and that animals’ and humans’ suffering are hidden in a shared landscape. This understanding is discussed as an ecological message about the interlinkages between the human and nonhuman worlds and between animals’ and humans’ wellbeing, also referring to the animal/human interconnectedness within the COVID-19 pandemic.

In 1997, the Nobel Prize-winning novelist J. M. Coetzee, invited to Princeton University to lecture on the moral status of animals, read a work of fiction about an eminent novelist, Elizabeth Costello, invited to lecture on the moral status of animals at an American college. Coetzee's lectures were published in 1999 asThe Lives of Animals, and reappeared in 2003 as part of his novelElizabeth Costello; and both lectures and novel have attracted the critical attention of a number of influential philosophers--including Peter Singer, Cora Diamond, Stanley Cavell, and John McDowell. InThe Wounded Animal, Stephen Mulhall closely examines Coetzee's writings about Costello, and the ways in which philosophers have responded to them, focusing in particular on their powerful presentation of both literature and philosophy as seeking, and failing, to represent reality--in part because of reality's resistance to such projects of understanding, but also because of philosophy's unwillingness to learn from literature how best to acknowledge that resistance. In so doing, Mulhall is led to consider the relations among reason, language, and the imagination, as well as more specific ethical issues concerning the moral status of animals, the meaning of mortality, the nature of evil, and the demands of religion. The ancient quarrel between philosophy and literature here displays undiminished vigor and renewed significance.

The figure of Elizabeth Costello, Coetzee's fictional persona, has proven to be very controversial. Reviewers and critics of The Lives of Animals, Elizabeth Costello and Slow Man, and even characters within those works, have described her as irrational and confused, even mad. Both her audience in The Lives of Animals and reviewers of this work have found her attack on reason to be excessive and her Holocaust analogy offensive. Abraham Stern, a character in The Lives of Animals, an ageing Jewish poet and academic, is so offended that he withdraws in protest from the dinner in Costello' s honour. Reviewers and critics like Douglas Cruikshank have considered her case for the sympathetic imagination to be inconclusive or unconvincing, with Cruikshank describing her as someone 'who comes off as something of a pill, a piece of work, a monopolizer of oxygen and presumably no treat as a mother-in-law.'1 Reprinted by permission of the Institute for the Study of English in Africa

Much has been written about the complicated intertextual relationships between J. M. Coetzee's novels and previous works by writers such as Franz Kafka, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Samuel Beckett, and, especially, Daniel Defoe. Relatively little has been written, in comparison, about any relationship between Coetzee and Defoe's great contemporary, Jonathan Swift. We claim no extensive structural relationship between Coetzee's novels and Swift's works-nothing like the formal interlace between Robinson Crusoe and Foe, for example. We do claim, however, a strong and explicitly signalled likeness of narrative stance, marked especially by the ironic distance between author and protagonist in Gulliver's Travels and Elizabeth Costello. We rehearse the extensive evidence of Coetzee's attention to Swift (both in novels and criticism) and suggest that there is a Swiftian dimension to Coetzee's oeuvre that is evident in several books, including Dusklands, Youth, Elizabeth Costello, and Diary of a Bad Year.

The figure of Elizabeth Costello, Coetzee's fictional persona, has proven to be very controversial. Reviewers and critics of The Lives of Animals, Elizabeth Costello and Slow Man, and even characters within those works, have described her as irrational and confused, even mad. Both her audience in The Lives of Animals and reviewers of this work have found her attack on reason to be excessive and her Holocaust analogy offensive. Abraham Stern, a character in The Lives of Animals, an ageing Jewish poet and academic, is so offended that he withdraws in protest from the dinner in Costello's honour. Reviewers and critics like Douglas Cruikshank have considered her case for the sympathetic imagination to be inconclusive or unconvincing, with Cruikshank describing her as someone \"who comes off as something of a pill, a piece of work, a monopolizer of oxygen and presumably no treat as a mother-in-law.\"

Much has been made of the purported insignificance of the Postscript that appends JM 'Coetzee's leventh novel, 'Elizabeth Costello'. In 'J.M. Coetzee's Austerities', Graham Bradshaw writes that ‗Apart from some searching pages in an essay by Lucy Graham, Coetzee's ―Letter has barely been discussed, and when it became the ‗Postscript' to 'Elizabeth Costello' one reviewer complained that it had no connection with that work' (8). In 'J.M. Coetzee and the Ethics of Reading', Derek Attridge, a long-time reader of Coetzee, calls the novel ‗anti-climactic'. It redeems itself, he writes, by reminding us that ‗what has mattered, for Elizabeth Costello and for the reader, is the event-literary and ethical at the same time-of storytelling, of testing, of self-questioning, and not the outcome' (205).

Beginning with Elizabeth Costello's statement to her hosts in J.M. Coetzee's The Lives of Animals concerning her vegetarianism, that it is not an ethical position rather an attempt to save her soul, the essay tries to gloss what she means. Although she seems to be standing up for the fullness of animal being she calls joy, it is clear that is not what she herself experiences when she tries to inhabit a state of passionate immediacy that she believes is the condition of animals in a free state. So tracking back through seventeenth-century ideas of a reflexive sensation, and deploying the insights of Daniel Heller-Roazen's history of the sixth sense, The Inner Touch , I try to show how Coetzee solves this problem of perception, of seeing that we see, or feeling that we feel. And here, I suggest, in this hegemonic state of perception, is salvation is to be found.