Youth: Scenes from Provincial Life II (original 2002; edition 2003)

"Youth" is a portrait of an artist as a young man - struggling to find his way.
Maybe I will just start with a quote;

"At 18 he might have been a poet. Now he is not a poet, not a writer, not an artist. He is a computer programmer, a 24year old computer programmer in a world where there are (yet) no 30 year old computer programmers. At 31 he is too old to be a programmer: one turns oneself into something else - some kind of businessman - or shoots oneself" Coetzee.

Darn. I have 7 foolscap pages of handwritten notes I made while reading. Somehow have to condense it. I will return to this.



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Review in progress / feeling too sick to write reviews too fast between coughing. This was excellent though. Want to read more of Coetzee. Recommend this for would be writers, poets or anyone really who is sucking on their misery / dark night of the soul stuff.

btw excuse slashes / as punctuation, my keyboard is cracking up in sympathy with my lungs. Delete, hyphen and various other keys not working.

Library borrow. Just discovered this author last night and found this slim volume on my college library shelves today. I am trying to expand the range of authors I'm reading so this is kind of like a test drive. ( )

Het tweede deel van Coetzee's autobiografie. Zeer indringend portret van zijn jonge, eenzame jaren in Londen. Hij werkt als programmeur maar dat hij kunstenaar zal worden is voor hem overduidelijk. Hij is extreem egocentrisch, hoekig in de omgang en zich daar zelf heel goed van bewust. Alles staat in functie van zijn roeping. Zijns moeders bekommernis wijst hij af, en lamlendig als zijn vader wil hij niet worden. De afstandelijke, bijna klinische stijl wordt naar het einde toe een beetje vermoeiend maar past helemaal bij de monomane introspectie die de schrijver zichzelf oplegt om tot volwassenheid te komen. ( )

A strangely interesting book about a very uninteresting youth. No backbone or brains, the boy was so in love with the thought of being a poet that he never realizes that he isn't one. Love the way it was written. ( )

Another great novel(la) from Coetzee. This guy has such a way with words. He just sucks you in. His novels are never uplifting but they describe the human condition with such vivid clarity that it almost makes you feel embarrassed to be a member of the species.

Youth is heavily based on Coetzee’s own experience of emigrating to early 1960s London. Even if you don’t know this when you pick it up, it’s apparent very early on. This lends the book an amazing realism which envelopes you in the character.

Having been a youth and, like Coetzee, been confronted with the myriad choices that lie before you in your early 20s as well as stretches in foreign countries, I completely related to the angst that “John” feels at every turn. Taking jobs that are compromises for the idealism he feels must be, surely, raging deep down in his being, this is a journey of self-discovery which leads pretty much nowhere.

While some might be frustrated with the brevity of the work and the lack of resolution I think this is a perfect vehicle for a description of youth. There is no defining moment in any of us where we can say we have arrived at adulthood. It’s not a matter of initiation but of self-realisation and that is paced differently for us all. For some it can take decades. This was the strength of the novel for me.

I felt very close to “John” and not least because that’s my first name. I related to his insecurities, to his fears and to his constant self-questioning. I wish he’d written this two decades before he did and that I’d had it available to me just as I was leaving school. It would have been much more important to me then. Nevertheless, it was a very good read and has spurred me on to read more of Coetzee. ( )

Read my review here on my book blog.Available at Teton County Library, F COETZEE ( )