In this novel, Elizabeth Costello, a celebrated aging Australian writer, travels around the world and gives lectures on topics including the lives of animals and literary censorship.

In her youth, Costello wrote The House on Eccles Street, a novel that re-tells James Joyce's Ulysses from the perspective of the protagonist's wife, Molly Bloom.

Costello, becoming weary from old age, confronts her fame, which seems further and further removed from who she has become, and struggles with issues of belief, vegetarianism, sexuality, language and evil.

First of all, she is a sixty-six-year-old woman who has committed all her life to writing, often neglecting not only her own needs but her children in order to give all her strengths to her work.

During her acceptance speech, she speaks about Kafka and the audience finds it difficult to follow her idea, for this kind of talk is not to their liking.

She then has another try, where she tells a fictional story that reveals a deeper appreciation of life, but the novel ends before she finds out whether she will succeed at passing through the gate.

As one analysis of Elizabeth Costello puts it, “The problem with Marx’s view is that there are human activities in which people find considerable value, such as giving birth, that are capacities we share with animals.

Like Marx, Hannah Arendt lauds one particular human attribute, in her case our capacity to take part in a shared world of political speech and action, on the grounds that it is what separates us from animals.

There is a certain casual brilliance in the way Coetzee extends Midgley’s critique of Marx to Arendt, whose philosophy is often thought to invert Marxism.” [3] The chamber opera Is this the gate?

[4] by the composer Nicholas Lens with libretto by John M. Coetzee is based on the last chapter of the novel (first performance at the Adelaide Festival 2024, Australia).