The Lives Of Animals - Softcover

J M Coetzee

Softcover

ISBN 10: 186197258X ISBN 13: 9781861972583

Publisher: Profile Books, 2000

Synopsis

Elizabeth Costello, a distinguished novelist, has been invited to the United States to give a university lecture on animal rights, a subject which has come to obsess her. Her son, his wife and his university colleagues confront her with reactions that run the range from sympathy to irritation and scepticism. Here the internationally acclaimed novelist, J.M. Coetzee, uses fiction to present a powerful and moving discussion of animal rights in all their complexity.

About this title

Review:

J.M. Coetzee, Winner of the 2003 Nobel Prize in Literature
""The Lives of Animals" is a moral argument within a fictional framework. . . . But fiction has the power to disturb and inspire strong emotions, and this book, thoughtfully argued and committed, is certainly a case in point."--Maren Meinhardt, "Times Literary Supplement"

""The Lives of Animals" is a stimulating and worrying book. It is hard to imagine anyone coming away from it without a new perspective on our relation not only to animals but to the natural world in general, and, indeed, to ourselves."--John Banville, "The Irish Times"

"I found "The Lives of Animals" a genuinely troubling book. . . . I imagine that Coetzee feels the force of almost all the ideas and emotions that his characters express. He is working and living at the edge of our moral sensibilities about animals."--Ian Hacking, "The New York Review of Books"

J.M. Coetzee, Winner of the 2003 Nobel Prize in Literature

J.M. Coetzee, Winner of the 2003 Nobel Prize in Literature

"[A] beautifully constructed, troubling, provacative book which resonates in the mind and heart long after you've turned the last page."--Helen Kaye, The Jerusalem Post

"If Coetzee . . . were an animal, he would be a fox-quick, aloof and crafty. . . . [A]nimal rights and ethical vegetarianism are natural subjects for him. The debate about them turns on questions of suffering, something to which Coetzee's sensorium is pitched with particular keenness."--Benjamin Kunkel, The Nation

"The audience of the 1997-98 Tanner Lectures at Princeton probably expected South African novelist Coetzee to deliver a pair of formal essays. . . . Instead, he gave his listeners fiction: a philosophical narrative about an imaginary feminist novelist . . . and the lectures she reads at the fictional Appleton College."--Publishers Weekly

"For Coetzee fans and others interested in the links between philosophy, reason, and the rights of nonhumans."--Booklist

From the Back Cover:

"Coetzee stirs our imaginations by confronting us with an articulate, intelligent, aging, and increasingly alienated novelist who cannot help but be exasperated with her fellow human beings, many of them academics, who are unnecessarily cruel to animals, and apparently (but not admittedly) committed to cruelty. The story urges us to reconceive our devotion to reason as a universal value."--From the introduction by Amy Gutmann

"Magnificent. . . . Coetzee's powerful and subtle text is irreducibly about real animal suffering, but it is also about much more."--Phil Baker, Sunday Times (London)

About this edition

• Publisher: Profile Books
• Publication date: 2000
• ISBN 10: 186197258X
• ISBN 13: 9781861972583
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 128