/lit/ - Literature

I'm reading a Jump by Nadine Gordimer. It's a book of short stories. Some are quite shit but there's one called Once Upon a Time (shitty title I know) that reminds me of The Burrow by Kafka. I would recommend that one.

I'm also rereading The Lives of Animals by J.M. Coetzee. It's a fictional lecture about animal rights which sounds pretty lame but it's actually really witty. His character pretty much trolls everyone in the book.

As much as I hate replying to a Quentin thread. I'm going to quote an interesting passage from JM Coetzee's The Lives of Animals that offers no clarity on the subject. I just feel like typing it.

Coetzee's character, Elizabeth Costello, is being debated over the issue of animal rights. The quote begins with her opponent:

"Specifically, my question is: Are you not expecting too much of humankind when you ask us to live without species exploitation, without cruelty? Is it not more human to accept our own humanity - even if it means embracing the carnivorous Yahoo within ourselves - than to end up like Gulliver, pining for a state he can never attain, and for good reason: it is not in his nature, which is human nature?"

[Costello replies:]
"I find Swift an intriguing writer. For instance, his 'Modest Proposal.' Whenever there is overwhelming agreement about how to read a book, I prick up my ears. On 'A Modest Proposal' the consensus is that Swift does not mean what he says, or seems to say. He says, or seems to say, that Irish families could make a living by raising babies for the table of their English masters. But he can't mean that, we say, because we all know that it is atrocious to kill and eat human babies. Yet come to think of it, we go on, the English are already in a sense killing human babies, by letting them starve. So, come to think of it, the English are already atrocious.

"That is the orthodox reading, more or less. But why, I ask myself, the vehemence with which it it stuffed down the throats of young readers? Thus you shall read Swift, their teachers say, thus and in no other way. If it is atrocious to kill and eat human babies, why is it not atrocious to kill and eat piglets? If you want Swift to be a dark ironist rather than a facile pamphleteer, you might examine the premises that make his fable so easy to digest.

"Let me now turn to Gulliver's Travels.
[continued. . .]

Anyone read The Lives of Animals by J. M. Coetzee?

It's basically a fictional academic (Elizabeth Costello) giving a couple lectures on animal rights, and responding to everyone who thinks she's too sensitive.

It's also about human rights

I read it in a couple hours (it's only 122 pages and really small) but the book was pretty cool and made me think about how the subaltern are treated in a new way.

Have you read it /lit/? Coetzee general thread if not.