Boyhood: Scenes from Provincial Life

Amazon.com ReviewUntil writing this book, the author of Waiting for the Barbarians and other acclaimed novels has remained determinedly private about the personal experiences that sparked his writing. In Boyhood, describing his youth in the third person, J. M. Coetzee limns the halting struggle toward maturity of a sensitive, bookish boy contemptuous of his weak father who yearns--and fears--to loosen a powerful attachment to his mother. He evokes the narrowness and cruelty of South African society in the years following World War II with the same austere yet passionate prose that distinguishes his fiction.Product DescriptionThe critically acclaimed author of In the Heart of the Country tells his personal story of growing up under apartheid in South Africa with a father he cannot respect and a mother he both adores and despises. 12,500 first printing.From Library JournalIn this slim, interesting volume, Coetzee, a South African writer distinguished both as a novelist (Master of St. Petersburg, LJ 9/1/94) and an essayist (Giving Offense: Essays on Censorship, LJ 3/15/96), reflects about who he is and why he writes as he does. Using third-person narration, these "scenes" read more like a novella than a true autobiography. Coetzee develops his character, a young boy on the verge of adolescence, through a richly detailed interior monolog. Trying to make sense of his place in his family, his parents' unhappy marriage, his conflicting needs for nurturance and independence from his mother, and his complicated feelings about the racially segregated society in which he lives, Coetzee struggles with basic questions of identity and purpose. The honest intensity he uses to examine his thoughts and actions leads to a foundation of self-understanding and confidence from which the writer was formed. Well recommended for writing programs and collections in general and multicultural literature. Denise S. Sticha, Seton Hill Coll. Lib., Greensburg, Pa.Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.From BooklistThe great South African novelist of Waiting for the Barbarians (1982) and the Booker Prize^-winning Life and Times of Michael K (1985) writes about himself for the first time in this candid memoir of a white South African childhood. The prose is spare and beautiful, the third-person, present-tense narrative totally true to the 10-year-old's self-absorbed point of view. He's both innocent and corrupt, blind and clear-eyed, weighed down by a sense of shameful secrets at home and at school, trying to make some sense of adult rituals. His confusion is comic ("He knows how babies are born. They come out of the mother's backside, neat and clean and white"), but his bewilderment is also a devastating indictment of the mad racist platitudes ("The custom, it appears is that after a person of color has drunk from a cup, the cup must be smashed"). There is no righteousness. He denies and detests his father, always; he is suffocated by his mother's self-sacrificial love. Only momentarily, as he gets a bit older, does he see them separate from himself as a man and a woman living dull and trouble-filled lives of their own. The distant family farm, a place both physical and mythic, is where he feels he belongs: "He loves every stone of it, every bush, every blade of grass." You end this book yearning for more: more vignettes and more connections between them. Hazel RochmanFrom Kirkus ReviewsA short and unsettling, deftly realized memoir of the celebrated South African writer's childhood in the hinterlands. South African memoirs, whether written by blacks or whites, tend to have a thread of sameness woven through: a sense of time and landscape as forces that irrevocably shape the soul. Coetzee (The Master of Petersburg, 1994, etc.), is no exception. Writing at the remove of the third person, he looks back at his youth in the distant dorp of Worcester, recounting how he was formed by his surroundings. This is not an eventful memoir--it's
Author: Coetzee, J. M.

Publisher: Viking Adult

Binding: Hardcover

Language: English

ISBN-10: 0670872202

ISBN-13: 9780670872206