|
||||||||||||||||||
|
||||||||||||||||||
|
||||||||||||||||||
| ||||||||||||||||||
Frequently Bought Together
Product Details
|
Product Description
From Amazon
After the brooding, dark menace of his Booker Prize-winning novel Disgrace, J.M. Coetzee's Youth is a slighter, more restrained work. Written in succinct, almost cold prose, it's a painfully maudlin bildsrungsroman that explores the dreary follies of youth rather than its more celebrated joys. The unprepossessing protagonist John is a South African mathematics graduate with literary aspirations, a dreamer who constantly yearns to meet a girl who will serve as his lover and muse. Having abandoned Cape Town after Sharpeville he finds Swinging '60s London grey, damp, and uninviting. Reluctantly he finds employment as a computer programmer. In between trundling from his grimy Archway bedsit to his soulless job, this autodidactic Pooter dabbles on a study of Ford Maddox Ford, composes an Ezra Pound-inspired poem (ostentatiously entitled "The Portuguese Rock-Lobster Fisherman"), and embarks on "one humiliating affair after another." Despite his artistic and romantic endeavors, John seems only able to cultivate "dull, honest, misery" and, broken by London, flees to a new programming job in Berkshire. Here he practically renounces literature and, for a while at least, concentrates on chess problems and feeding primitive computers magnetic tape. His creative and sexual drives appear to have gone, leaving him to consider the possibility that he might actually have grown up.
Like the halting, self-interrogating consciousness of John's computers, Coetzee renders his character's inner life through a series of rhetorical questions. These lend the book a curiously existentialist air but also contribute to its slightly dilatory gait. (It feels far longer than its 170-odd pages.) Coetzee's tone is so laconic it's hard, on occasions, to be entirely certain if John's poetic ambitions should be pitied or simply laughed at. However, this novel does offer an unflinchingly acute dissection of the adolescent male psyche. --Travis Elborough, Amazon.co.uk --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
From Publishers Weekly
One need not have read Boyhood, Coetzee's previous autobiographical account, to appreciate this sequel, as he continues to look back on his quest for identity and a yearned-for vocation as a poet. Written from a third-person, present-tense point of view, but intimately describing the inner life of John, this slim memoir examines several years of Coetzee's expatriate life as he flees Cape Town in the 1960s to educate himself and pursue his destiny in London. It's a bleak time. A series of failed encounters sexual and social leave the emotionally immature protagonist feeling lonely and isolated. He wavers between pretentious defenses of his artistic purity and self-loathing assessments of his lack of talent and his unease as an outsider. A soul-destroying job as a computer programmer at IBM sucks away his peace of mind. Other attempts to do meaningful work and to establish personal relationships ensue, but the grand moment of definition never comes. John is waiting for romance or tragedy to strike so he can be consumed and remade, but he has only a flawed, naive understanding of the world. Simultaneously miserable in London and convinced that South Africa is an accursed wound within him, he rejects both as inimical to literature. Booker Prize winner Coetzee's (Disgrace) artistry allows him to write about his youthful self from the vantage point of adult knowledge while reflecting on his self-involved intellectual and social gaucheries with detached, wry humor. Though he fails to make his intense and awkward personality particularly appealing, Coetzee succeeds in defining the dilemma of the artist-as-a-young-man in sympathetic if angst-ridden terms that reflect the doubts of those who decide to devote their lives to literature without any idea of how they can make a meaningful contribution.
Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
Tags Customers Associate with This Product(What's this?)Click on a tag to find related items, discussions, and people.
|
What Other Items Do Customers Buy After Viewing This Item?
Customer Reviews
|
Share your thoughts with other customers:
|
||||||||||||||||||||||
|
Most helpful customer reviews
5.0 out of 5 stars
A worried young man...,
By Friederike Knabe "“We write to taste life twi... (Ottawa, Ontario Canada) - See all my reviews (TOP 50 REVIEWER) (REAL NAME)
This review is from: Youth (Paperback)
Sometimes there is an advantage in reading books by the same author in reverse order. This has been the case here for me. Having read and greatly enjoyed his most recent Summertime: Fiction, in which Coetzee creates an intriguing portrait of one John Coetzee, deceased, a kind of alter ego, and whose personality emerges through interviews and recollections by several friends and acquaintances. In his 2002 portrait "Youth" he distances himself from the younger John by writing what he terms an "autre-biography"*). Written in the present tense and in the third person, the story has a lively and immediate reality while at the same time suggesting a clear distance between the author and his subject. With the hindsight of SUMMERTIME, this reader for one, wondered how much Coetzee has creatively changed or adapted the realities of John's growing up story to suit his idea of who he might have been.Coetzee concentrates on a decisive period in John's life - from his mid-teens to his early twenties. In this coming of age portrait of John, we see an awkward youth, whose mind hovers between ambitious dreams and self-doubt. He is a young South African, determined to escape the confines of family and the restrictions in his country. Coetzee presents us with a fascinating and often entertaining quasi-memoir, set against the backdrop of a tumultuous period in history: The frequent unrests and subsequent violent suppression of protests by South African blacks (e.g. Sharpville), the Cuban missile crisis, the declaration of South Africa as a republic, etc. John, while a reasonably successful mathematics student, sees his real calling in being a poet. Poetry for him is the ultimate in artistic expression, prose would only be second best. He also dreams of being kissed by a muse, falling madly in love and that everything else will follow from there smoothly and happily. Life, not surprisingly, turns out very differently and Coetzee's sense of irony is subtle, yet evident throughout the novel. John is somewhat of a reluctant student of passion, experiencing it more vividly in his mind than he is able to transpose it into reality. Leaving South Africa, he moves to London and from there to a country estate in Berkshire where he is employed as a computer programmer. The description of his daily routines, in North London in particular, and his commentary on life around him are wonderfully accurate, perceptive and also funny. Having lived there for many years, I could relate to many of John's experiences. His ambitions, on the artistic and the personal fronts, don't progress as hoped and are, at least for a while, pushed to the back of his mind. Somewhat disillusioned John nevertheless finds a certain level of inner peace. However, this state of mind and body can only be temporary and he soon struggles again with options and alternatives to move on. Will he get back to his dream of being a poet? Or will he have to settle for second-best and try his hand on prose. J.M. Coetzee writes in a dry, yet engaging style. The reader feels empathy with the subject and despite Coetzee's detached and often ironic analysis of John's complex inner struggle, the reader cannot help but smile at times as John describes the environment around him. [Friederike Knabe] *) In an interview with David Attwell in 2002, Coetzee asserted that "all autobiography is autre-biography", or the biography of an other. "Genre definitions", he said, "- at least those definitions employed by ordinary readers - are quite crude.
5.0 out of 5 stars
Event horizon,
By Matko Vladanovic (Zagreb, Croatia) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Youth: Scenes from Provincial Life II (Paperback)
My voyage of trough Coetzee's books continues as the time progresses, and as I read more and more, I begain to undersatnd all that I failed in earlier readings...and I find myself wondering, how could one write so good, how could one put on paper every thought that troubled me since I'm aware of my existence...This you may call an autobiography, an autobiography which presents a young student, artist-to-be, fleeinf from sout-africa in a land of romantic poets, The england, where he does not find, neither poets nor art... If you ever wondered about your place in modern world, if you ever longed for an "old times" this is the book for you... (Oh, I almost forgott - if you don't have an elementary education of romanesque poets, philosophy and general conception of the world, this book will be slightly incomprehensible :)
5.0 out of 5 stars
Heavy,
By "big-apple" (Bruges, Belgium) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Youth: Scenes from Provincial Life II (Paperback)
Very beautiful written. But don't expect an easy-listening afternoon. This book is black. Very black. A very depressing athmosphere but interesting to the reader. It gives you the chance to look back yourself and see what you reached so far in life. And are you better off than John, who is in fact Coetzee himself? You look trough the eyes of a young man who has thrown himself into the big world while in fact he is not ready. Coetzee reveals his youth in London and wich kind of person he was. At the surface he seems egoistic, asocial and pathetic but deeper you discover someone completely else. Just by reading.
Share your thoughts with other customers: Create your own review
Want to see more reviews on this item?
|
|
Listmania!
Look for similar items by category
Look for similar items by subject
Feedback
Would you like to update product info or give feedback on images?
|
