Youth is the second part of Coetzee’s fictionalised semi-autobiography, covering his early twenties. As with Boyhood, it is narrated in the historic present, third person. As before, the narrator is called “John Coetzee”.
Coetzee has left South Africa for London, which he thinks of as a kind of second-string Paris for artists. He’d go to Paris, only he can’t make headway with the language.
The London of the 1960s is a bleak place. It rains constantly, and John is unable to form social ties with any of the inhabitants. Although intoxicated by London’s mix of nationalities and their supposed sexual freedom, John finds no satisfaction or permanence in any of his sexual relationships, all of which are describe pitilessly, and never to his advantage.
His background – perhaps strangely for a writer – is in mathematics. Perhaps more understandably given its relationship to philosophy, his fascination is with pure maths rather than its more prosaic applications in real life. But he badly needs a job, and his maths are a marketable skill. He finds a job as a computer programmer at IBM.
As a programmer myself, I can relate to the drudgery that Coetzee suffers as he solves computing problems for people that he either doesn’t care about or actively despises. He quits IBM, citing an inability to form close relationships with other members of staff, an embarrassing reason he invents in order to cover up his greater embarrassment at the real reason: his determination to become a poet.
As with Boyhood, and all Coetzee’s work, Youth is beautifully written; never overwritten, never too plain, in impeccable taste. Coetzee is remorselessly candid about his fictional self’s motivations, failures and flaws; astonishingly so, really. He emerges from it as a deeply serious, moral and above all literary man. Fascinating.
No related posts.