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Loading... Scenes from Provincial Life: Boyhood, Youth, Summertimeby J. M. Coetzee
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Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book. No current Talk conversations about this book. J.M. Coetzee has a reputation as an extremely modest, publicity-averse sort of writer - and of course he can afford to be: if you have that many trophies on the mantlepiece, you don't exactly need to go to small-town book-signings every day. But even modest writers usually manage to boast a little bit about their achievements in their memoirs, to look back with amusement at their youthful struggles from the olympian heights of where they are now, and of course to take it for granted that any vengeful ex-lovers will save the embarrassing revelations for posthumous biographers. Not so Coetzee, apparently: his chief concern in these three lightly fictionalised fragments of autobiography seems to be to show us all the ways in which he falls short of his own standards for what a Coetzee, an Afrikaner, a writer and a human being should be. He shows us his subject "John Coetzee" as a boy at school, as a student and then an exile in England, working in the computer industry, and then back in 70s South Africa as a teacher and academic who has yet to make his mark as a writer. In the first two parts the form is relatively conventional - there are plenty of other famous memoirs in which the author writes about himself in the third person and in the present tense - the only real peculiarity being the absolute exclusion of any kind of explicit hindsight. Coetzee-the-narrator never lets us spot him taking advantage of the intervening years to put events into context or add information we know John-the-subject couldn't have had access to at the time. That gives the text a lot of the rawness and immediacy of a novel, preventing us from standing back and saying "Ah well, that was before...". Boyhood is mostly about the young John attempting to work out the rules of the complex world he lives in, constantly frustrated by his parents' inability to be "normal" - they speak English, not Afrikaans, they don't go to church, they don't vote for the National party, etc., but they have an Afrikaner name, and they live in the same squalor as their Afrikaner neighbours, not up in the posh part of town like the "real" English and the Jews... Then, when he goes to his grandparents' farm in the Karoo, he feels utterly drawn towards this landscape, even though he knows he has no sort of right to it. Youth has John at a stage where he knows from everything he's read and dreamed that it's only a matter of days or weeks before the Significant Thing must happen - he will meet the person he wants to spend the rest of his life with and/or find the inspiration to write the great poem/story/novel he's destined to produce and/or discover the professional satisfaction in computer programming that's been eluding him so far and/or take the world of literature by storm with the insights in his MA dissertation on Ford Maddox Ford. But things go on not happening. Affairs with women are unsatisfactory and are usually ended by him behaving badly in some way; his writing is getting nowhere; Ford, apart from the great novels he already knew, turns out to be a bore; and computers are taking John to places where he doesn't really want to be, not least to AWRE Aldermaston. Then in Summertime Coetzee changes course to play with a quite different and much more dangerous formal approach. He kills off his subject and hands the narration over to Vincent, a clumsy academic and not very good writer, who is compiling material for a biography of "John Coetzee before his breakthrough". As in the last part of Iris Murdoch's The Black Prince, one unreliable narrator is replaced by a whole bunch of others, as Vincent interviews four women and a man who were close to John in one way or another during the first years after his return to South Africa - a married woman with whom he had an affair, one of his female cousins from the Karoo, a Brazilian dance teacher who may have been the inspiration for the woman in Foe, and two faculty colleagues, one male and one female. The whole is topped and tailed by fragments of John's notes presumed to be from an abandoned attempt at a third volume of memoirs. And of course all of it is set up to show us John's repeated failures (as far as the witnesses know) to connect in the wholehearted way he would like to have done with his family, students, his lovers and with the broken culture of the broken country he grew up in. It's often extremely funny, but it makes painful reading. And it - of course - doesn't manage to answer the question it poses, how someone who seems to be damaged in ways that prevent him from getting to grips in real life with what it means to be a human being could ever be able to write novels that purport to tell us just that. Probably, we have to look into ourselves and decide that no-one could ever really attain the standard of humanness that Coetzee sets himself - as one of his characters points out, Gandhi couldn't dance. no reviews | add a review
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In one volume, JM Coetzee's majestic trilogy of fictionalised memoir, Boyhood, Youth and Summertime. Scenes from Provincial Life opens in a small town in the South Africa of the 1940s. We meet a young boy who, at home, is ill at ease with his father and stifled by his mother's unconditional love. At school he passes every test that is set for him, but he remains wary of his fellow pupils, especially the rough Afrikaners. As a student of mathematics in Cape Town he readies himself to escape his homeland, travel to Europe and turn himself into an artist. Once in London, however, the reality is dispiriting: he toils as a computer programmer, inhabits a series of damp, dreary flats and is haunted by loneliness and boredom. He is a constitutional outsider. He fails to write. Decades later, an English biographer researches a book about the late John Coetzee, particularl y the period following his return to South Africa from America. Interviewees describe an awkward man still living with his father, a man who insists on performing dull manual labour. His family regard him with suspicion and he is dogged by rumours: that he crossed the authorities in America, that he writes poetry. Scenes from Provincial Life is a heartbreaking and often very funny portrait of the artist by one of the world's greatest writers. No library descriptions found. |
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Google Books — Loading... GenresMelvil Decimal System (DDC)823.914Literature English & Old English literatures English fiction Modern Period 1901-1999 1945-1999LC ClassificationRatingAverage:
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Bottom line: a very unusual sort of "memoir," interesting, but something of a slog, mostly because its subject was just not a very pleasant person. Was glad to be done with it.
- Tim Bazzett, author of the memoir, BOOKLOVER ( )