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The Lives of Animals Paperback | Pages: 136 pages
Rating: 3.69 | 2410 Users | 199 Reviews

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Title:The Lives of Animals
Author:J.M. Coetzee
Book Format:Paperback
Book Edition:Anniversary Edition
Pages:Pages: 136 pages
Published:May 6th 2001 by Princeton University Press (first published 1977)
Categories:Fiction. Philosophy. Animals. Academic. School

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The idea of human cruelty to animals so consumes novelist Elizabeth Costello in her later years that she can no longer look another person in the eye: humans, especially meat-eating ones, seem to her to be conspirators in a crime of stupefying magnitude taking place on farms and in slaughterhouses, factories, and laboratories across the world.

Costello's son, a physics professor, admires her literary achievements, but dreads his mother's lecturing on animal rights at the college where he teaches. His colleagues resist her argument that human reason is overrated and that the inability to reason does not diminish the value of life; his wife denounces his mother's vegetarianism as a form of moral superiority.

At the dinner that follows her first lecture, the guests confront Costello with a range of sympathetic and skeptical reactions to issues of animal rights, touching on broad philosophical, anthropological, and religious perspectives. Painfully for her son, Elizabeth Costello seems offensive and flaky, but—dare he admit it?—strangely on target.

Here the internationally renowned writer J. M. Coetzee uses fiction to present a powerfully moving discussion of animal rights in all their complexity. He draws us into Elizabeth Costello's own sense of mortality, her compassion for animals, and her alienation from humans, even from her own family. In his fable, presented as a Tanner Lecture sponsored by the University Center for Human Values at Princeton University, Coetzee immerses us in a drama reflecting the real-life situation at hand: a writer delivering a lecture on an emotionally charged issue at a prestigious university. Literature, philosophy, performance, and deep human conviction—Coetzee brings all these elements into play.

As in the story of Elizabeth Costello, the Tanner Lecture is followed by responses treating the reader to a variety of perspectives, delivered by leading thinkers in different fields. Coetzee's text is accompanied by an introduction by political philosopher Amy Gutmann and responsive essays by religion scholar Wendy Doniger, primatologist Barbara Smuts, literary theorist Marjorie Garber, and moral philosopher Peter Singer, author of Animal Liberation. Together the lecture-fable and the essays explore the palpable social consequences of uncompromising moral conflict and confrontation.

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Original Title: The Lives of Animals
ISBN: 069107089X (ISBN13: 9780691070896)
Edition Language: English
Characters: Elizabeth Costello

Rating Based On Books The Lives of Animals
Ratings: 3.69 From 2410 Users | 199 Reviews

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I read this for my book club; Im the one who suggested this book. Id wanted to read it for many years. I had thought that it was a novel whose main character is an animal rights advocate. Its not and for me that was a disappointment.Its mostly essays by other authors than the main author, referring back to Coetzees pieces: Amy Gutmann, Marjorie Garber, Peter Singer, Wendy Doniger, and Barbara Smuts. Except for Singers, which is a fiction piece, theyre basically non-fiction pieces.The authors

I stopped eating meat, for environmental reasons, during my first year of college. Then a few years passed, and I entered that slippery state of "flexitarianism," which really means, "I eat meat when I want to," i.e. too often. I picked up The Lives of Animals as an intervention. The book has pleasantly surprised me, in a couple ways. First, it doesn't have a clear political agenda. It helps that J.M. Coetzee can hide behind his fictional characters (or step behind, if "hide" sounds too

I'm glad I was able to read it and especially glad I didn't have to pay $20 to buy it. I thought Coetzee's "academic novella" had poorly written characters and a badly told story, if it was supposed to be story. However, I was delighted and surprised to see Peter Singer's work of "fiction." Seems like he had a ball writing that! What a talented writer and astute ethicist (Singer). I bet Singer would have written a much better academic novella than Coetzee. And ... isn't Coetzee a fiction writer,

3,5 stars

I read this book for my writing course, Our Animal Selves. Coetzee writes about a famous author, Elizabeth Costello, who is invited to give a talk at a university. Coincidentally, her son works there. While there, Costello doesn't given an expected speech about literary works, but about human-animal relations. The next day she gave a seminar about poets and animals and finished her visit with a debate with a philosophy professor.It was kind of hard to pick apart the arguments Costello used since

This is another Odyssey project reading. The book as a whole is kind of interesting because of the essays that accompany the main story, which is a pair of lectures written as a fiction story.That said, the main story of the novelist giving lectures about how humans should do something in regard to animals differently than they do now falls flat for me. Coetzee's apparent alter ego of Costello doesn't seem to know what she wants people to do. She is a vegetarian, but doesn't suggest that for

Excellently written discussion on animal rights and ethics of currently prevailing human approach towards animals.