Literature is something like magic when the concise is capable of addressing everything, when language, a fundamental intellectual tool, manages to decipher the symbolic and approach metalanguage as a single voice in the tower of Babel of the world. A perfect balance between substance and form, a full command of communication
And in that John Maxwell Coetzee He is the master of masters in everything that involves adjustment between the most precise words for the fullest scenario, which goes from the gestures of the characters to the deep meaning of the words said by each protagonist or added by the narrator to finish balancing the material world, always subjective, and that other world of doors inwards, between the spiritual or the moral.
In this volume of Seven Moral Tales, we recover the voice of Elizabeth Costello, one of those characters who, since her birth as her own entity to title a novel, extended her presence to other unforgettable novels such as Slow Man.
And it is that Elizabeth Costello, as a writer, is in charge of contributing the psychoanalytic aspect of what happens, with that awareness-raising intention towards the adjustment of reality, that adjustment that we make as we interact and respond to every minimum challenge, to every peremptory decision .
In the seven stories, rather stories, we discover that area of everyday life, a space in which in a more palpable way we discover our loneliness to take charge of our lives. Elizabeth Costello helps us to seek mimicry, the change of skin, the contradiction experienced in those other characters who, thanks to that exquisitely precise language of the author, is able to present us before the daily judgment of our own decisions.
And it is thanks to this mimicry that each of the seven stories raises the most necessary notions of empathy, not as a solution to human communication (there are no magic recipes), but as a necessary leap from one soul to another. Seven stories that nurture the intellectual, the reason, the notions about so many hows and whys.
If literature is usually an adventure, an exercise of imagination to face other lives, what this book is about living and thinking in a different way about our own ship, rocked in an ocean of decisions that mark our erratic journey.
You can now buy the book Seven Moral Tales, an essential volume by Coetzee, here: