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Type of bind: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 823.914
EAN num: 9780142002001
ISBN number: 0142002003
Label: Penguin (Non-Classics)
Manufacturer: Penguin (Non-Classics)
Quantity: 1
Page Count: 176
Printing Date: October 07, 2003
Publishing house: Penguin (Non-Classics)
Release Date: October 07, 2003
Sale Popularity Level: 352393
Studio: Penguin (Non-Classics)
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Editor's Notes and Comments:
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.
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
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Rated by buyers 
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This book by South African writer J. M. Coetzee is not exactly an autobiography, as it recounts a few years of his life, from about the time he was 19 to his mid 20s, during the early 1960s. Though less than 200 pages long, this is hardly a fast read. Coetzee's writing style is not overly complex, but he packs so many things in it, in terms of ideas and reactions to the world around him, that you have to go slow in order to pay close attention. Not that the life shown here is particularly eventful, since most of the time he finds himself bored and lonely. A familiar theme in autobiographies by writers is growing up alone and with few friends and this book certainly shows this. If his male friends are few, his relationships with women are even worse, sordid and often abusive. The book starts in South Africa as the narrator finishes his degree in mathematics, while secretly dreaming of becoming a poet. After the Sharpeville massacre, he decides to move to London, where he works at jobs he finds depressing, very first in IBM and then in a British computer firm. Far from being Swinging London, the English capital depicted in this book seems cold and depressing. The protagonist (presumably Coetzee himself) seems very selfish, and self possessed, seemingly incapable of developing a meaningful relationship with fellow human beings. Coupled with a job that he finds meaningless, his only solace (aside with occasional casual sex) comes with reading poetry. Since the book ends when the protagonist is in his mid 20s, the immediate question after reading this book, is what happened to him after that, did he become wiser or did he grew up to be a bitter man.
Rated by buyers -
Coetzee's second autobiographical novel is a story of flights and also an 'Education sentimentale'.
It is a flight from the oppressiveness of his family and the love of his mother - `the bond with the firstborn' -, from the socio-political situation in South-Africa - `an albatross around his neck' - and from mortgage shackles. In one word, it is a flight to freedom.
He arrives in London, but the city turns him into a beaten dog: no work, no stay. He quickly understands that the struggle for life is still going on, that he will have to find his place in the world and that he has to prove that he belongs to this earth.
Intellectually, he is attracted to Pure Thought (mathematics), but he also wants to become a poet. He makes his very first encounters (through reading and radio programs) with world literature, e.g. Joseph Brodsky who teaches him that `poetry is truth'.
Sentimentally, he has to fight against his own depths of coldness, callousness, caddishness, his lack of heat and heart. He falls in love with filmdivas, but his own love (better: sex) life is not that of a `fine' author.
In impeccable prose, J.M. Coetzee painted without any shame a very realistic picture of a `Youth-struggle'.
Not to be missed.
Rated by buyers 
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It seems that Coetzee, winner of two Bookers, is taken awfully seriously. And, that this is a book based upon his own formative years, adds to that pontificating ouvre. I found the book to be awfully funny, as a Salinger-like view of youthful naivete and stumbling ambition, that may well be a look back with some wiser perspective and storytelling exaggeration. Indeed, the novel's insulated viewpoint, exclusively that of this immature lad, cannot disguise the hilarity of his views of D. H. Lawrence, for instance, or his hormonal lassitudes with the women visiting his bed, for better or for worse. That he takes it all so seriously cannot, it seems to me, be mistaken for the author's meaning it to be experienced at some remove as the follies and misplaced assured utterances of the would-be writer. The ending is typically ambiguous, but does seem to be a turn into the temporary trap of middle-class white-collar life, which does not smoothly fit what has come before it. That it is the subject of such a somber at-face-value reading does not match a closer (and less awe-struck) examination of the book.
Rated by buyers 
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At 19-years-old, J.M. Coetzee felt he had to get away. As a white growing up in South Africa during the late 1950s, the Sharpeville Massacre and the fear of being drafted caused Coetzee to leave his homeland in the midst of obtaining his university degree. He fled to London, "...where life can be lived to its fullest intensity" (41). Though working as a computer programmer in London, Coetzee's true aspiration was to be writer, an artist. Constantly wishing his life were more like some of the writers he read, Coetzee's memoir, Youth, takes its readers through his confused mind as he tries to discover what he can and wants to become. While feeling Coetzee's struggle along the way, the conclusion leaves the reader wondering what happened subsequent that caused him to write this book.
Throughout the memoir Coetzee is effective in conveying his struggle to his readers. Continually questioning his motives, the memoir is intriguing as Coetzee begins his new life and makes decisions through which he tries to figure out who he is to become in this different place. Told chronologically, the reader is left in constant anticipation for the subsequent turn of events, whether one is on the way or not. After complaining about the problems in South Africa, Coetzee abruptly changes scenes in the subsequent chapter. "It is late, past midnight...No matter: he is in London (41)." The reader, immediately confused as to his location, becomes engrossed in Coetzee's decision to move and what will become of him. The reader wants to know how London will help Coetzee get past his South African struggles to become a happier man.
Turning down and quitting solid jobs, Coetzee is always trying to get away, to start anew. Running away from Africa, then an IBM job, Coetzee's unrequited search for meaning establishes good ethos. As everyone has had to get through struggles in their own lives, the reader can relate to some of Coetzee's struggles. As Coetzee describes the troubles of a man in search of passion, love and art, the reader can only hope that soon he will find what he is looking for.
Rated by buyers -
Knowing that J. M. Coetzee won the Nobel Prize in Literature several years ago, I undertook to discover his books, and YOUTH was the very first I read. Written in 2002, YOUTH is a fictionalized biography of Coetzee's adolescent, beginning in 1959 and ending around 1964.
As the book open the protagonist, whose name is John but who is usually referred to simply with the male pronoun "he", is a student of mathematics in a university in South Africa. He is also a would-be poet and a passionate lover of literature, especially of Ezra Pound. The plot of much of the very first half of the book is the protagonist's discovery of the literary corpus, adoring certain authors only because Pound spoke highly of them, or ignoring whole literary traditions because Pound condemned them. I found this an interesting meditation on how much new literary interests are formed from older interests instead of from discovering an author unexpectedy.
John eventually leaves South Africa after the Sharpeville massacre, arriving in London and trying to make something of himself, though all he finds are soul-sucking jobs in the fledgling computer industry. Much of the novel is dedicated to his relationships with women, which he finds difficult since "the poet must always keep one eye looking inward." Coetzee depicts the uncertainty of the protagonist through constantly asking rhetorical questions.
In spite of all the challenges the narrator faces, Coetzee maintains the illusion that this is a Bildungsroman where the protagonist will ultimately find confidence in his writing. After all, Coetzee ended up being a successful novelist, so this thinly veiled portrait of him could be expected to be triumphant in the end. This illusion persists until the second to last page of the novel, but Coetzee's ending is ultimately one of the most nihilistic I've encountered outside of Mishima's cycle "The Sea of Fertility".
While entertaining enough, I found the novel fairly unexciting and wouldn't recommend it in general. However, if you are looking to get started on the oeuvre of J.M. Coetzee, YOUTH is hardly a letdown, and serves well as a road towards his other work.
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