Word: costello
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...gives the spirituality and frequent Christian symbolism of the songs ("See the thorn twist in your side"; "I stand with the sons of Cain") a welcome grounding in earthly delights. "Their show is the best around," remarks an appreciative T Bone Burnett, a guitar player and record producer (Elvis Costello, the BoDeans) of no mean skill. "U2 is what church should be." Lest such praise become a little burdensome, Larry Mullen keeps this reflection handy: "At the end of the day, it's just rock 'n' roll...
...getting terribly befuddled in the process. "What do I believe? I believe in those little frogs," the novelist said. This was not J.M. Coetzee, the South African now based in South Australia - he was too busy collecting his 2003 Nobel prize for literature - but his pesky character Elizabeth Costello, whose "Eight Lessons" formed the basis of his last "meta" novel. Stranded at the gates of heaven, she was rambling about the Victorian mudflats of her childhood when Elizabeth Costello came to its oblique...
...loses first his leg, then his dignity and, perhaps, his mind. Dour of disposition and without family, he's drawn to his hot-blooded Croatian nurse, Marijana Jokic, whose troublesome brood he offers to support. At which point "the unattractively freckled, somewhat fleshy shoulders" of Elizabeth Costello appear up his stairs. Is she an authorial intervention? A meddling cupid? A cynic about his real intentions with the Jokics, whom she sees as more avaricious than angelic? Or is she the amputee's perfect companion? In Slow Man, she's all of the above, and a wonderful literary conceit to boot...
...When Elizabeth Costello commands Paul to "push the mortal envelope," he tries to oblige, virtually adopting Marijana's teenage son Drago and rescuing his sister Blanka from a brush with the law. But it's the pull to her push that gives the book its arresting comic edge. Like "scrupulous doubter" Coetzee himself, Paul doesn't totally believe in the merits of his tale: "I am not a hero, Mrs. Costello." The lady, of course, won't have a bar of it. She exhorts Paul to be a fictional hare rather than a tortoise: "Don Quixote is not about...
...Marijana's shapely legs: "How does love work among the animals? ? Are there such things as shapely legs among lady spiders, and does their attractive force puzzle the male spider as it draws him in?" Paul will continue to ask such questions, and like her author's id, Elizabeth Costello will continue to sally forth. In this way, Slow Man is more literary hare than tortoise, showing why Coetzee continues to be fiction's quixotic knight...