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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
An unsentimental childhood,
This review is from: Boyhood: Scenes From Provincial Life (Paperback)
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.
7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Spare, but wonderfully insightful,
By
This review is from: Boyhood: Scenes From Provincial Life (Paperback)
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.
7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A killing-you-softly tale,
By A Customer
This review is from: Boyhood: Scenes From Provincial Life (Paperback)
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.
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