The Lives of Animals

by J.M. Coetzee

Book Overview

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...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0691173907
• ISBN13: 9780691173900
• Release Date: October 2016
• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Length: 144 Pages
• Weight: 0.35 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.5" x 5.4" x 8.4"

Customer Reviews

Creative Context for Animal Rights Review

This small book provides a wonderfully insightful perspective on the issues surrounding compassion and respect for animals. It reviews some of the main arguments, but in the context of two lectures given by an aging academician. Adding to the substance of her lectures is the curious passive nature of her son's response, who seems to miss the point, while mainly experiencing a sense of discomfort and embarrassment at the actions of his mother. This is very readable and is intelligently written.

Well written and thought provoking

It's not very traditional, and stylistically it reminds me a good deal of novels by Calvino, Sontag, Kundera, etc. that don't necessarily have a standard narrative. The lectures and debate take up most of the story, but it is not like reading non-fiction. I disagree with criticisms that Coetzee is disguising his own lectures, mostly because I don't think he could have accomplished the same thing as a non-fiction piece. I found the ideas about reason and literature interesting, and was drawn in by the debate offered on the treatment of animals. This main part of the book also appears as 2 chapters within Coetzee's novel, Elizabeth Costello, which is where I read it. Although I enjoyed E.C., it was the material also published as The Lives of Animals that was most interesting to me. But for more about the main character in The Lives of Animals, you could buy Elizabeth Costello to begin with. (Though then you would not get the introduction or the reflections that appear in The Lives...).

Brilliant clarification of the questions involved

This is an ingenuous work about animal rights, ethical treatment of animals and vegetarianism. I expected it to be a persuasive polemic on animal rights, and what I found was that it was a brilliant complilation of writings on a theme that raises many issues and questions on the relationships between humans and other animals with great respect for many viewpoints. Coetzee (1940-), who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2003, is a critic and writer who was born in Cape Town, South Africa. His novels include: Dusklands, In the Heart of the Country, Waiting for the Barbarians, Life and Times of Michael K, Foe, Age of Iron, The Master of Petersburg and Elizabeth Costello. He's won the Booker Prize twice (the first author to do so). He also has written two volumes of autobiography. He has a Ph.D. in literature from the University of Texas at Austin,and also spent time, between his master's and doctorate, as a computer programmer. He's spent several stints in the United States as a visiting scholar. I share this level of background on Coetzee because I think in this case, it is warranted. THE LIVES OF ANIMALS is a volume comprising many kinds of writing, fiction, argument, scholarly responses and, even I think, memoir in context. And it asks and doesn't answer the question of what Coetzee, personally, thinks of the ideas raised within. The main text of THE LIVES OF ANIMALS comes from the 1997-1998 Tanner Lectures at Princeton University. Atypical of the usual philosophical essays given in the series, Coetzee read two short stories on the way humans treat and view and philosophize on animals, and within these stories, are lectures and question-and-answer series on animal issues. The main character, Elizabeth Costello (an apparent pre-apparition of the so-named Elizabeth Costello of his most recent novel), has been invited to lecture at Appleton College in America. A writer, she has been invited to speak on whatever she likes, and she chooses humanity's treatment of animals to talk about at several events. Her son, John, is a physics and astronomy professor there, and is hosting her -- he calls her interest in animal rights her "hobbyhorse." The son's wife, a philosophy professor who can't seem to get a tenure-track position in the same city as her husband, and his mother do not get along, and Costello's "radicalism" on animal rights confounds the son and irritates his wife to no end. Coetzee's lecture was broken up into two sections, "The Philosophers and the Animals" and "The Poets and the Animals." In each, Costello deals with human treatment of animals in that context, among others. In the first, she gives a philosophical essy on animal treatment at the college, and in the second, she addresses a literature class using poets' treatment of animals as inspiration for her talk. Her last event is a debate. During her lecture, Costello, who deeply and emotionally values the lives of animals, makes a connection between the Holocaust and the mechanize

An original approach to the issue of cruelty to animals

J. M. Coetzee is known for his critical eye in his novels and essays. With 'The lives of animals', Coetzee now turns that eye to the issue of animal cruelty, and he does it in a novel way that, to my judgement, is very effective. The issue of animal cruelty is so emotionally charged that it is virtually impossible to deal with it only from the realm of Western philosophy. On the one hand, Western philosophy tends to be too detached from the subject discussed. In making the issue more 'rational', Western philosophy loses its power to impact and to convince. On the other hand, Western philosophy is rarely accessible to most people, mainly because its language is so arcane that only an intellectual elite can understand it. In other words, animal cruelty, approached from the point of view of Western philosophy, becomes another academic issue, almost entirely alienated from the gruesome reality out there--a reality that needs to be exposed and addressed in more practical terms. With 'The lives of animals', Coetzee seems to be saying just that, and he deftly uses literature to approach the issue because only literature can make philosophy accessible and deal with emotions.Does Coetzee succeed in his enterprise? I think he did, but he does it by leaving everything unresolved. It seems that Coetzee is saying that, ultimately, it's a matter of personal choice and commitment. Since the issue is so complex, since so many variables enter into the equation, since any side can defend itself with any arguments just as convincingly, we are left on our own, with our own contradictions. Coetzee deserves to be credited for exposing the complexity of the issue, not in providing easy, sloganistic answers.The four commentaries to Coetzee's text attest to the complexity of the issue. I found Peter Singer's reflections particularly germane. He says: 'I feel, but I also think about what I feel. When people say we should only feel--and at times Costello [Coetzee's main 'character' in his text] comes close to that in her lecture--I'm reminded of Goring, who said, 'I think with my blood.' See where it led him. We can't take our feelings as moral data, immune from rational criticism.'I also found Barbara Smuts' reflections illuminating because of the wealth of her experience as researcher in animal behavior. Her thesis that we should learn to treat animals as 'persons' is cogently exposed, and deserves to be taken into account if we are to make any progress in treating animals properly.In short, I recommend this little book to anyone interested in the issue of animal cruelty. It should be, indeed, required reading in some course on ethics to generate debate and try to come with more convincing and comprehensive anwers.

Not a manifesto

I'm not a vegetarian or a fighter for anyone's rights. The fable told here I find generous and touching, the comments long-winded. The activists will think the opposite. I trust the story: my stars go to the teller.