Youth

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 show more 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. show less

I read this book before I should have done, I suppose - it's the second volume in a trilogy called 'Scenes from Provincial Life', and I haven't read the first one. That fact notwithstanding, I enjoyed 'Youth' tremendously. The story charts the narrator's early academic career in South Africa, followed by relocation to the UK, where he struggles to manage the demands of working for a living against his writing aspirations.

Coetzee's style makes reading the book an easy matter, although what most writers would simply declare, he instead opts to show through a question, and by the time you reach the end of the book the number of rhetorical questions asked of the narrator must surely be approaching a thousand. If you're happy to accept this show more - as I was - you will find here a book with a clear and cogent voice; others might find the approach a touch grating. show less

You'd think that there'd be more action in the second part of a kind-of-auto biography, and in one sense there is more action here than in Boyhood. He has various jobs, he moves overseas, he has depressing sex with a great number of women while convincing himself that he's a complete failure with women. But for all that it's less affecting, as if the need to tell the 'story' over-rides what made Boyhood great. There's still lots going on... perhaps it's just harder to have anything but contempt for the Coetzee of these pages, who holds onto a pathetic residual romanticism despite having pretty good taste in books; who is disturbingly fixated on his penis/his fixation on his penis; and manages to make even a nice period of his life end show more up with an image of him losing at a game of chess. Anyone who's ever lost at a well played game of chess will know the frustration, and appreciate the analogy. But it's hard to see how having a good job, with some decent friends, albeit without being a Major Author, gives rise to that level of frustration. show less

http://shawjonathan.wordpress.com/2009/12/01/coetzees-youth/

This is the second of three (so far) novels in Coetzee's Scenes from Provincial Life series, which are fiction, but also by strong implication unsparing autobiography. It takes up our hero as an 18 year old student and aspiring poet living in a one-room flat in Capetown and drops him again as a 24 year old computer programmer living in an upstairs room in a house in the depths of the Berkshire countryside, convinced that he is a total failure.

It's the 1960s. The young Coetzee is committed to escape being defined by his family, trapped in the dullness of colonial life, and torn apart in what he sees as the impending revolution in South Africa. He aspires to the status of poet, show more and theorises endlessly to himself about how he should live (as opposed to write) to achieve that aim. He agonises over his incompetence in relationships with women, over which writers and artists he should emulate (Ezra Pound presides over his pantheon, and Beckett the novelist is a late apparition), over how to shake off his colonial identity. He rationalises his moment of appalling behaviour and then berates himself for his rationalising. He aspires to Angst, but realises his sole talent is for 'misery, dull, honest misery'.

Young Coetzee's misery, confusion about sex, self castigation, romantic theorising and bitter disillusion are all presented without commentary, but with a gentle irony – which may derive partly from the reader's knowledge that this pathetic youth went on to win the Nobel Prize (and possibly that an idea that comes and goes on page 138 was the seed of his first novel), but which also simmers in the prose, bubbling to the surface as outright comedy often enough to suggest, without invalidating the character's intensely felt experience, that an older, wiser head is constantly there, shaping the story. My favourite bubble pops up when young Coetzee, who lives alone and feeds himself with classic adolescent male incompetence, is ruminating on Ford Madox Ford:

'Ford says that the civilization of Provence owes its lightness and grace to a diet of fish and olive oil and garlic. In his new lodgings in Highgate, out of deference to Ford, he buys fish fingers instead of sausages, fries them in olive oil instead of butter, sprinkles garlic salt over them.'

We do wonder if he misses the point about so much else by quite so wide a mark.

Young Coetzee was writing an academic thesis on Ford. The paragraph after the one I just quoted describes the thesis as involving 'the task of reducing his hundreds of pages of notes in tiny handwriting to a web of connected prose'. My sense is that this book has achieved something very like that: whether Coetzee has drawn on actual diaries from that period or on the virtual pages of his recollection, he has created from his material a shiny, elegant narrative web.

Early in his stay in London, young Coetzee hears a BBC talk about the Russian poet Joseph Brodsky and is enraptured by his poetry. He reflects on what Brodsky and a handful of other poets mean to him:

'they release their words into the air, and along the airwaves the words speed to his room, the words of the poets of his time, telling him again of what poetry can be and therefore what he can be, filling him with joy that he inhabits the same earth as they. 'Signal heard in London – please continue to transmit': that is the message he would send them if he could.'

If in my early 20s I could have received this book as a signal, I would have responded, I'm sure, with a very similar joy. As it is, confident though I am that J M Coetzee won't be reading my blog, I'm sending him a belated message on behalf of my younger self: 'Signal heard in Sydney 40 years later – please continue to transmit.' show less

Youth is the second of Coetzee's "Scenes from Provincial Life" autobiographical trilogy. This time, John is young and desperate to leave South Africa, to go and become a poet in London. London is not quite what he expected.

Again, Coetzee holds up a blowtorch to his young life, and shows himself warts and all without sugar coating his failings as a human being. I would say I didn't think he liked himself that much, only I saw a lot of myself in him too, so I think he was just being brutally honest. C'mon, who hasn't been an absolute fool at one time or another as a young person? At least he admits it, and makes fascinating reading out of it.

But it wasn't mean or nasty, I think he was able to mostly laugh at his youthful foibles (the show more biggest: waiting for the woman who through passionate sex will open him up to the poetic creativity he so desperately desires; and the worry that maybe he needs to get the poetry right before he can meet his destined woman). It was also interesting being in a dark, miserable London in the early 1960s. Not to mention the computer programming. (Really.)

It does end on a bleak note, however, with his youthful ambition apparently discarded in the need to have a job. But not totally bleak: this man did go on to win the Nobel Prize for literature. (But not for poetry...) show less

Another stellar read from Coetzee. I started this and next minute I was looking at the free end page...I devoured it. Not much happens, traditionally plot wise. But I couldn't help but see myself in this book, with the characters musings on poetry, the minor tragedies of an artist trying to find his art, in a world heavily reliant on pathetic and mundane rituals, also known as making a living.

J. M. Coetzee is a strange author to me. Not unlike Cormac McCarthy, he has written books that I've loved (Disgrace) and books that I've despised (Life & Times of Michael K), and though I know he is a supremely talented writer, he's a bit up in the air in my book. So I approached Youth with caution, and while it was not a disappointment, I can't say I was overwhelmed by it either.

The story is a strange mix of fiction and nonfiction, a book that reads like a novel but seems inspired (right down to the protagonist's name, John) by the author's life. It essentially comprises the details of John's coming of age, from his early work in South Africa to his escape to and disenchantment in London, working jobs to try and support his true dream show more of being a poet. Along the way he has failed love affairs and laments the difficulty of the life he has chosen, meditating on literature and beauty while trying to make ends meet in a hectic, difficult city.

The problem with a narrative constructed in such a way is that it constantly feels imbalanced, as if it's trying to negotiate a middle ground between the intense personal reflection and the day-by-day grind of the plot points. It's far more interesting to hear what Coetzee's hero is thinking, but it gets bogged down in endless description of computers and offices. It never feels like the plot has any trajectory--which may be the point, since the relatively apathetic John doesn't have much of one either--but that doesn't a great story make, as it turns out.

Thematically, the novel is greater than the sum of its parts. It feels natural to take love, sex, and poetry and constantly meld them throughout the work, and for the most part the effect of these images are clear and not forced. It seems a bit of stretch late in the work when John blames his failings in life on his insufficiencies in the bedroom, but it's also consistent with the mentality of a man his age. And despite being a reflection on life in the 1960s, the vaguely emo-ish tone of the text (which was written in 2002) feels contemporary enough to work.

All told, Youth is a bleak and fairly depressing look at Coetzee's early life, but it has its share of satisfying moments. Those looking for a clear arc from start to finish will likely be irritated--and while I don't know if reading Boyhood (Scenes from Provincial Life) first makes this any more coherent, it's still an engaging and honest look at one's own trials and tribulations. show less