J.M. Coetzee is possibly the greatest writer working in the English language at the moment. Unaccountably, his brilliant Summertime failed to win this year’s Booker Prize, but he’s already bagged the prize twice, and is a recent Nobel Laureate.
Boyhood is the first book in a semi-autobiographical trilogy, of which Summertime is the concluding part. I’ll review the later novel in due course, even though I read it first.
Boyhood gives us a wonderful picture of what it is like to be an intense, lonely, intelligent and sensitive child. This picture is all the more fascinating because of the violence of the society that he grows up in: the South Africa of the 40s and 50s.
While the novel is clearly closely modelled on Coetzee’s own life, he distances himself from autobiography by narrating the novel in the historic present and in the third person. It gradually emerges that the narrator is called “John Coetzee”.
The charm of the book relies on the narrator sharing the young John’s sense of wonder and confusion at the world around him, which beautifully captures the twisted sense of reality and the skewed importance we place on insignificant things as children. Things that we understand perfectly as adults appear afresh, as perplexing as they were when we first encountered them.
John’s relationship with his parents is strained, his contempt for his embezzling, naïve father barely concealed. He lives a life of the mind, albeit a young and as yet unformed one. Although he plays it down, his sensibility is clearly that of a writer-in-waiting.
It’s as fascinating, touching and beautifully written an account of a childhood as you could hope to read.
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