Product Description

The second installment of J. M. Coetzee's fictionalized "memoir" explores a young man's struggle to experience life to its full intensity and transform it into art. The narrator of Youth has long been plotting an escape-from the stifling love of his overbearing mother, a father whose failures haunt him, and what he is sure is impending revolution in his native country of South Africa. Arriving at last in London in the 1960s, however, he finds neither poetry nor romance and instead begins a dark pilgrimage into adulthood. Youth is a remarkable portrait of a consciousness, isolated and adrift, turning in on itself, of a young man struggling to find his way in the world, written with tenderness and a fierce clarity.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #121566 in Books
• Published on: 2003-10-07
• Released on: 2003-10-07
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 176 pages

Amazon.com Review
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

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.

From Library Journal
Picking up where his memoir Boyhood left off, Coetzee chronicles his coming of age in South Africa and London during the 1960s. Writing in the third person, Coetzee narrates the story of a young mathematics student named John who is hungry for excitement, adventure, and mystery. Increasingly dissatisfied with his inability to suck life's marrow in his native South Africa and also afraid of being conscripted into the army, John runs off to London to seek his fortune. He finds a job as a computer programmer, but his heart's great desire is to burn with the inner flame of the artist, so he spends his spare time writing poetry (he worships Ezra Pound) and searching in London bookshops for poetry journals. Along the way, he assuages his loneliness with sexual affairs, only to become lonelier when he realizes that he cannot offer these women a clue to the darkness that lies inside him. D.H. Lawrence meets Alan Paton in Coetzee's sometimes brilliant, sometimes tedious account of his sexual exploits, revolutionary fervor, and artistic evolution. This second memoir by the author of Waiting for the Barbarians and other popular novels is recommended for all libraries.
- Henry L. Carrigan Jr., Lancaster, PA
Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

Customer Reviews

A further Addition to a Fascinating Mosaic
Coetzee, a South African writing in English, was the first author ever to receive two Booker prizes (Peter Carey did it again last year). He is celebrated for his economical style, his ability to draw together complex themes seamlessly, and his honesty when exploring the psychology of the individual. In "Youth," Coetzee presents a non-fictional account of his experiences as a student and struggling poet in England from the ages of 19 to 23. "Boyhood," a prior volume which appeared in 1997, described the author's life from the ages of 10 to 13.

Coetzee's works frequently explore the isolation of a singular personality against a background of tangled relationships and political turmoil, such as in "Disgrace" and "The Life and Times of Michael K," both of which give a gripping if refracted view of disintigrating South African society. Another recurring theme, especially visible in "Foe" and "Disgrace," is the hostility of the natural world and this cruelty reciprocated by us - in the way we relate both to animals and other humans.

Readers who have come to expect these elements in a Coetzee story will be on familiar ground when they turn to "Youth," or the first volume of Coetzee's memoirs, "Boyhood." The accounts both have the feel and sound of a novel: they are written in the third person and in the present tense. They also contain the psychological intimacy of the living story - tied completely to Coetzee's own subjective experiences at the time, and devoid of any effort to present any facts or historical data not germane to his emotional and literary lives.

Critics approaching these works have paused at the use of the third person point of view, the brevity of the volumes, and the six year gap between the two accounts. Some have even questioned the author's truthfulness. The third person perspective and the use of the present tense draw the reader immediately into the account and add a clarity and resonance that are sacrificed in the traditional memoir format. The gaps and the brevity in the accounts might under other circumstances call into question the author's honesty or objectivity. Yet Coetzee is unremittingly merciless in revealing his (then) mediocrity as a writer, selfishness, repression and insensitivity. I can think of no account that presents a less favorable view of its creator, a view that ultimately may be somewhat unjustified. Clearly Coetzee has been unswerving in his singular pursuit of truthfulness and excellence as a writer, and a writer with a conscience, at that.

The criticisms in my view are these volumes' greatest strengths. It is as though the writer is saying to us: "I have the greatest respect for you, so I will not waste your time with irrelevant information regarding the uninteresting periods of my life. I will not burden you with facts and history. Here you will find essences only, the truths regarding my struggle, the people and events that have defined me."

I have no doubt that "Boyhood," "Youth," and the subsequent volumes that no doubt will follow, will stand in the highest rank of autobiographical achievement. As in "The Enigma of Arrival," by V.S. Naipaul, and "The First Man," by Albert Camus, other colonial writers who struggled with and discovered their artistry in Europe, the distinction between novel and memoir, fact and fiction is blurred, but something wonderful and paradoxically more honest is created.

Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Rarely have I encountered so much insight and knowledge in such a short 169 pages. "Youth" is the second novel by the Nobel Prize-winning author J.M. Coetzee. The first, "Waiting for the Barbarians" was a novel about societies whereas "Youth" is a novel about an individual. I get the strong suspicion that this is an autobiographical novel although I know little, if anything, about the author's life. However, his subject character's thoughts, actions, and observations are so real and humanly imperfect that I have to feel the book emerges from the authors own memory. If I'm right, it's all the more reason to praise the talent of Coetzee because he is willing to share the good and the bad about himself. Even if it isn't autobiographical, it is a masterful disection of the inner soul of an emerging adult writer.

"Youth" tells the story of a young man of university age who sensed that his future as a writer in his native South Africa is hopeless. He also realizes that his entire life there is hopeless. We see the clumsiness of his relationships with others; especially women. Most of this is his own fault as he sees everything in the context of whether it will help the development of his artistic talent. Love has no serious role to play in this life (at least at this point in his life). He emigrates to London (his other options for artistic development were Paris and Vienna). Unfortunately he has to get a job and his mathmatical background enables him to find a reasonably good one. However, everything continues to be measured in its' ability to enhance or detract from his development as a poet. The book ends with the anticipated dispair that such a detached life would bring.

The strength of "Youth", for me, is the author's ability to bring us such a candid view of an obsessed life and leave us wondering how we would have done things different. There are many actions and attitudes that we would have definitely handled differently. Yet, the candid reader will see himself committing many of the same errors. It's hard at 53 to remember just what I would have done 30 years ago without the maturity (hopefully) that comes with age and experience. Many authors, I believe, make their youthful characters too mature for their age. Who wants to spend time describing warts when the character is destined for greatness. Coetzee gives us a dose of immature reality and teaches us about ourselves through the improper and unrealistic expectations of a narcissist. We learn by wanting to reach out and correct our anti-hero's shortcomings. We also learn by occassionally seeing ourselves as well. It was an eye-opening experience for me to read "Youth". I'm more anxious than ever to read more of Coetzee.

Superb
Twenty taut chapters of lucid prose is what Nobel Laureate Coetzee conjures up in this superb little novel. It is - presumably - a largely autobiographical work about a young South African (himself) leaving his native Cape Town for the UK in the hope that a life in London may finally wrest from him his ultimate destiny: to become a poet. The book brilliantly exposes the mind of this sensitive and somewhat listless youth, who searches for identity and meaning through a rare mix of poetry, computing, and a host of miscarried love affairs.

Coetzee is a master of erudite objectivity, suspending outside judgement in a stream of succinct observations. His narrative runs its course with hardly an extraneous word, and, although the themes are often somber, he maintains an undercurrent of optimism. The result is both satisfying and memorable.

This book is highly recommended. Read it and enjoy.