J.M. Coetzee, Elizabeth Costello

Already the only writer to win the Booker Prize twice, South African novelist Coetzee nabbed an even bigger honor in October in this year’s Nobel. He certainly didn’t net such accolades by avoiding controversial topics-consider 1999’s Disgrace, a complex story about animal rights, racism, and his homeland’s iniquitous history and uncertain future. He’s notoriously enigmatic, rarely grants interviews, and once gave a lecture at Princeton not as himself, but in character as a fictional novelist speaking at a fictional college. His new novel expands that last premise into a fully fleshed-out book, an odd duck that’s not exactly fiction and not exactly a collection of essays. Elizabeth Costello’s titular heroine is a renowned Australian writer whose career is resonantly similar to Coetzee’s own; just how much we’re meant to correlate the two is one of the book’s sources of mystery. Structured as a series of eight public lectures that obliquely function as Costello’s autobiography, it’s a work with next to no traditional plot, but much in the way of thought-provoking and even deliberately confrontational ideas. This is writing intended to draw blood. There is certainly some self-observation taking place when Coetzee, in the book’s opening chapter, wonders why the public adores Costello even though “she is by no means a comforting writer. She is even cruel.”