From the October, 2004 issue of *Touchstone*

Book Review

Intriguing Lessons

Elizabeth Costello
by J. M. Coetzee
Viking, 2003
(230 pages; $21.95, hardcover)

reviewed by Peter J. Leithart

J. M. Coetzee won the Nobel Prize for literature last year on the strength of nearly a dozen novels, collections of essays, and other writings. His writing is spare, crystalline, precise, and unsentimental.

The plot of one of his best-known works, Disgrace, turns on the rape of Lucy Lurie, a young South African woman who is running a farm in the countryside, a rape that takes place while her father is pathetically locked in the bathroom helpless to intervene. Coetzee handles this scene with understated . . .

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Peter J. Leithart is an ordained minister in the Presbyterian Church in America and the president of Trinity House Institute for Biblical, Liturgical & Cultural Studies in Birmingham, Alabama. His many books include Defending Constantine (InterVarsity), Between Babel and Beast (Cascade), and, most recently, Gratitude: An Intellectual History (Baylor University Press). His weblog can be found at www.leithart.com. He is a contributing editor of Touchstone.

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