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Machado de Assis Vox Poetica James Wood reviews ‘Elizabeth Costello’ by J.M. Coetzee · LRB 23 October 2003 There may be many readers who, on hearing of J.M. Coetzee’s Nobel Prize, immediately thought about the cost of clarity. There is so much, after all, missing from Coetzee’s distinguished books. So Coetzee’s latest book, a series of philosophical dialogues bound into rather fitful fiction, might initially seem unappetising. Coetzee, by contrast, read a story about Elizabeth Costello, who – in the fiction – had been invited to Amsterdam to talk about the problem of evil. In the fictions that Coetzee delivered at Princeton, Costello announced that she could see no difference between the Holocaust and the daily holocaust visited on animals by the food industry, that her sensitivity to animal suffering and to the silent complicity of millions of humans was so great that it was as if, when she washed her hands in a friend’s bathroom, the soap wrapper said ‘Treblinka – 100 per cent human stearate.’ Just because ideas cannot be won does not mean that they cannot be traced. She is not an idea.

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