Customer Reviews

Boyhood: Scenes from Provincial Life

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Having grown up in Cape Town in the 1960's at a time before apartheid was rigorously enforced, JM Coetzee's account of his boyhood, while on the surface austere and aparently joyless, was pure pleasure for me to read. I revelled in the absolute accuracy of his descriptions and the ruthless, heartless honesty of a child who must function in a world that is often alien and confusing. It brought back numerous incidents of my own childhood - the stuff that nowadays is unacceptable to disclose. Along with Tobias Wolf's This Boys Life and Truffaut's The 400 Blows, Boyhood is a wonderfully honest record of childhood.

Touching, illuminative, and compulsively readable, the first volume of South African writer J.M. Coetzee's "autobiography" is a wonderful introduction to the writer if you aren't familiar with him (as I wasn't). His prose style is spare but descriptive, and conveys South Africa in the late '40s and early '50s as seen through the eyes of a child. Not big on "plot," but based more upon observation, Boyhood is a quiet triumph.

Not quite a memoir, not quite fiction, Boyhood is elegant and powerful in the way of J.M. Coetzee's novels, only more so. A white boy growing up in post-WW2 South Africa may not appear an awfully exciting proposition. But this is not quite a book on South Africa, either. Its images will disturb you, lead you astray: at times Boyhood reads like a darkly intriguing fairy-tale. The detached third-person narrative has surprising effects: the story becomes more moving, the thinking more probing. Perhaps the truly African ingredient here is the passion beneath the simple sentences on common enough childhood experiences. A rare book that will tug at your heart, despite the author's reputation for "austerity" and "intellectually forbidding" writing.

I read "Boyhood" immediately after reading "Angela's Ashes." The similarities are startling: children subjected to the superstition and reticence of adults, the misinformation passed off as wisdom by other children, the demands of a culture that come across as inexplicable imperatives, the power as well as the ineffectiveness of adults, the complicated relationship between sons and mothers.

The boy, John, is bright enough to see for himself the harshness of the culture, the indifference of the adults around him to the beauty of children, the arbitrariness and the hypocrisy of adults. What he doesn't see is that although he considers himself an outsider, he has internalized some of these same characteristics himself at an early age.

I found the book moving and disturbing. It evoked many memories of my own childhood -- the confusion, the necessary lies, the feeling of being different and not acceptable to other children, the expectations of caste, the strangeness of adult behavior. It also helped me recall the joy of learning, of physical activity, of creation, of playing with language. Coetzee is able to create literature out of the confusion of his experience. One hopes that in the process he has managed to avoid the brutality that he observed in the children he grew up with.

Here we finally have the privilige of reading a little about Coetzee's past and some of the experiences that have shaped him into the author he is today. As a young boy in Cape Town, he is an exemplary student scoring at the top of his class for most everything except for English (surprisingly enough). On the homefront, however, he is a completely different boy. His father is an uninvolved father to say the least. His mother tries to make up for his father by being a wonderful support and help. Too often, though, she is choking with her affection and Coetzee vacillates between intense love and dislike for her. He also appears to be a fearful and dramatic child. He is afraid someone will find out he is not a "real" Catholic, that he'll be terribly embarassed in front of all his friends and not know what to do, that the double life he leads at home and at school will be detected, etc., etc. He is bound by these fears in that instead of believing that if any one of these things actually did happen, life would certainly go on as it did before, he feels as if he would surely die. Granted, he probably means this in the figurative sense, yet it reveals extreme dramatical tendencies for a boy his age. This inclination may have been the root to the imagination that has matured into the creative and intuitive authorship Coetzee has come to be known for today. A little slow-going in the beginning, Boyhood picks up nicely after 100 pages and finishes off just as well.

Coetzee's real achievement here is to stick so close to a boy's consciousness that it hurts: the wisdom coupled with the lack of context for it, the physicality of feeling, the impossibility of articulation. Eschewing plot and character for an anecdotal narrative, Coetzee captures a boy's sense of reality, a reality that can't be easily transformed into narrative. A work of tremendous integrity and pain.

A fairly intriguing portrayal of one's boyhood - though in a subdued manner. Hard, clean, unsentimental narration with great psychological insights - just what you'd expect from a good writer as Coetzee. The portrayl of the mother-son relationship is pretty deep, of his complicated feelings towards her: a mixture of reliance and contempt, of love and fear, with an undertone of sympathy and admiration from the grown up narrator. Scenes of Coetzee among others - classmates, relatives, etc. are discontinuous, fragmented memories, depicting the formation of self. One has to understand some of these in relation to the African society at that time though, so a little background information will help.
I wouldnt think of this book as a classic, but it does have one of the most profound moments in contemporary memoirs. There's this moment when Coetzee recalls his first childhood memory: of him sitting next to his mother on the bus, and him letting something go in the wind. I wont go into details - I'd only say that moment is everything: memories, love, understanding; the beginning of self-awarenes, of one's relation to things, to the outside world; of the sadness and happiness deep inside that one cannot describe.

I'm in the midst of reading Coetzee's Boyhood, Youth and Summertime.

I enjoyed Boyhood very much. How much is fictionalized and how much is biography is something I tried not to worry about as it's not relevant to the story. This is about a year or so in the childhood of John Coetzee when his family moved from Capetown to Worcester (according to Wikipedia Worcester is 120 km NE of Capetown). It also deals slightly with their subsequent return to Capetown.

Coetzee is the smartest child in his class and takes great pride in being so. He is an outsider and has difficulty with the Afrikaans boys who tease him. Some of the novel deals with his school life where he mysteriously reports himself to be Roman Catholic to avoid time in "Christian" singing sessions. Thus he is ostracized by many of the boys and the Catholic boys don't believe he is one of them. The other parts deal with his homelife and his mother's quirkiness and his father's more normal life.

It's a very short novel (less than 170 pages) and provides a very enjoyable memoir of an odd, intelligent boy in 1950s South Africa.

What I love about Coetzee is his directness and his ability to capture inner thoughts in an accurate and disarming way. Frequently, I found myself thinking that he was capturing exactly how a boy thinks but in a way that most people don't write about.

I very much enjoyed Boyhood and definitely recommend it.

In this youth memories, J.M. Coetzee defines himself as `twice-born: `born from woman and born from the farm'. He is, first of all, a mother's son (`he clings to her as his only protector'), but `the farm is his secret fate'.
Growing up in a rude and unsocialized family with eccentric characters, with a father who becomes an alcoholic and a mother, for whom `studying is just nonsense' and `children should be sent to trade school', he nevertheless continues to study `normally'.
Through school, he discovers the real world around him: the different social classes, the opposition (and ostracism) between black / colored and white (race), English and Afrikaans (language), and Catholic / Protestant and Anglican (religion).

This clear, sublime, impeccable prose is a far cry from J.M. Coetzee's struggling `Beckettian' beginnings.
Its undercooled, accurate and still dramatic style makes this book a marvelous and moving read.

In "Boyhood," J.M. Coetzee revisits his childhood as a white, English child growing up in South Africa. Written in the third person, Coetzee's memoir takes a detailed investigation into his own childhood, a time he refers to as "anything but a time of gritting the teeth and enduring." Through his own memoir, Coetzee raises many questions about society, and offers examples of young adult struggles that are shared by many.
On page twenty eight towards the beginning, Coetzee parallels his life to that of a spider. "He begins to think of himself as one of those spiders that live in a hole in the ground with a trapdoor. Always the spider has to be scuttling back into its hole, closing the trapdoor behind it, shutting out the world, hiding." Shy, easily embarrassed, and usually worried, a young Coetzee is very similar to any small and fearful creature. But unlike the quote from above, Coetzee's passiveness is shown through numerous scenes and examples with very little explanation done by the author. Instead, Coetzee lays out the story, and draws the reader to draw their own conclusions.
The most stunning, and intriguing example of this is in the way that Coetzee uses language to present his relationship with his mom. Instead of telling us that he his confused and at a loss in his relationship with her, he shows us through his sporadic and at times conflicting feelings towards her. For example, look at the two lines below taken from the book:
"He wishes she (his mom) did not love him so much. She loves him absolutely, therefore he must love her absolutely...The thought of a lifetime bowed under a debt of love baffles and infuriates him to the point where he will not kiss her, refuses to be touched by her."
"She buys tickets for him and his brother. `Go in, I'll wait here,' she says. He is unwilling but she insists. "
In this first example, he misinterprets his mother's love to be a curse, and a nuisance, and meets it with a cold heart. But at the same time, he does not want her to leave his side when he goes into an amusement park. What I have yet to reveal is that these two lines are on the exact same page, an example of how Coetzee transplants the inner conflict that he felt as a child on to the pages themselves.
It is important as well to remember that Coetzee writes the book in the third person, which allows him to disconect himself from the main-character. This disconnect allows for Coetzee to be much more critical of himself and to point out observations that he may not have realized as a child. This literary trick is another example of how Coetzee is at his best in this novel.
J.M. Coetzee's literary prowess shines through in his dark and despairing memoir of his childhood. While detaching himself from his childhood, and refusing to tell the reader but instead lay down the facts and let the reader do the work, Coetzee has accomplished much in this novel. At one point Coetzee asks his readers, "If he were no longer himself, what point would there be in living." Of course he does not explicitly leave us with an answer. None the less, in this memoir of mental and physical growth we as readers are reminded that the struggle to be ourselves is shared by all.