{"id":5490,"date":"2011-04-19T18:23:27","date_gmt":"2011-04-19T22:23:27","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/?p=5490"},"modified":"2016-06-29T23:05:19","modified_gmt":"2016-06-30T03:05:19","slug":"j-m-coetzee-boyhood","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/2011\/04\/19\/j-m-coetzee-boyhood\/","title":{"rendered":"J.M. Coetzee: Boyhood<\/em>"},"content":{"rendered":"
Boyhood<\/strong><\/em><\/span>\r\nby J.M. Coetzee (1997)<\/span>\r\nPenguin Books (1998)<\/span>\r\n166 pp<\/span><\/pre>\n
Certain that I would enjoy them, I’ve been putting off reading J.M. Coetzee’s three\u00a0fictional memoirs for some time, even going so far as to assume that, had I read it,\u00a0I would have chosen\u00a0his third, Summertime<\/em>, as the 2009 winner of the Booker Prize. So, when I got that Coetzee craving, familiar over the past\u00a0few years, I delved in, reading\u00a0each of the\u00a0three one after\u00a0the other. I won’t spoil my reviews of the next two, but I will say that I was right to suspect I would enjoy the first,\u00a0Boyhood: Scenes from Provincial Life<\/em>.<\/p>\n
\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n
In writing this memoir, Coetzee has chosen\u00a0to adopt a rather unique perspective (which worked so well in his fellow South African Damon Galgut’s In a Strange Room<\/a><\/em>): he’s writing about himself in the third person. Where one might expect “I\/We lived outside the town of Worcester” one instead gets “He\/They lived outside the town of Worcester.” Worcester is a small town, out of the way,\u00a0in South Africa. This provincial background will haunt him later on when he wants to become a serious artist, longing for a more dramatic boyhood in, say, London. The time period is the late 1940s and early 1950s, just before and after\u00a0Coetzee\u00a0reaches adolescence. I’d say this background hindered him not in the least, providing ample\u00a0experience for a supreme output that also happens to include a wonderful, rich\u00a0book about that very background.<\/p>\n
As the book develops,\u00a0one is, of course,\u00a0reminded of\u00a0James Joyce’s\u00a0A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man<\/em>.\u00a0In fact, in many ways,\u00a0Boyhood<\/em> is a portrait of who Coetzee was in youth, giving a bit of insight into how he became the author of his oeuvre.\u00a0In\u00a0the book, which reads much more like a novel than a memoir, Coetzee gives us\u00a0youthful impressions of terror and fascination in a variety of familiar situations\u00a0— at\u00a0school, in sickness, at sport — and\u00a0of wonder and repulsion at a dawning awareness of words, art, and social ills. Furthermore, much\u00a0of this book deals with Coetzee’s early uneasy relationships with his mother and father. But similarities to a masterpiece of world literature do not diminish\u00a0Coetzee’s accomplishment. In fact, I welcomed the obvious connections.<\/p>\n
In regards to his relationship with his parents, Coetzee’s\u00a0relationship with his mother is both tender and sad, rendered in unsparing prose. We sense just how much Coetzee yearns for her, feels comforted by her. At the same time, perhaps because of his dependence and certainly because of his demeanor, he yearns to separate himself and, through general coldness or alienation, succeeds in\u00a0gradually pulling away, something she recognizes but is powerless to remedy.<\/p>\n
He shares nothing with his mother. His life at school is kept a tight secret from her. She shall know nothing, he resolves, but what appears on his quarterly report, which shall be impeccable. He will always come in first in class. His conduct will always be Very Good, his progress Excellent. As long as the report is faultless, she will have no right to ask questions. That is the contract he establishes in his mind.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n
A central character in\u00a0Boyhood<\/em>, it is interesting to track his relationship with her in the future books where her absence sticks out all over the place. In this book, the absent parent (which will also change in future books) is Coetzee’s father; he’s\u00a0practically on the periphery of his son’s experience at this point in time.<\/p>\n
He has never worked out the position of his father in the household. In fact, it is not obvious to him by what right his father is there at all. In a normal household, he is prepared to accept, the father stands at the head: the house belongs to him, the wife and children live under his sway. But in their own case, and in the households of his mother’s two sisters as well, it is the mother and children who make up the core, while the husband is no more than an appendage, a contributor to the economy as a paying lodger might be.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n
What his father does in his absence becomes very important to Coetzee’s fate. Again, it is fascinating to track this relationship, which has a certain\u00a0degree of resentment and\u00a0repulsion, and see it develop into a type of tenderness.\u00a0It reminded me of some of the relationships in Coetzee’s other books, principally the relationship between Michael K and his mother in\u00a0Life and Times of Michael K<\/a><\/em>.<\/p>\n
Another central aspect to this book is Coetzee’s developing intellect.\u00a0One passage in particular that\u00a0certainly brings up\u00a0A Portrait of the Artist as Young Man<\/em>\u00a0was the one that explored, as Coetzee grows up, his fascination with words and sounds that all connect at an early age\u00a0into an intelligent perspective on\u00a0language and\u00a0its beautiful subtleties.<\/p>\n
Is fok<\/em> is spelled with a v<\/em>, which would make it more venerable, or with an f<\/em>, which would make it a truly wild word, primeval, without ancestry? The dictionary says nothing, the words are not there, none of them.<\/span><\/p>\n
Then there are gat<\/em> and poep-hol<\/em> and words like them, hurled back and forth in bouts of abuse whose force he does not understand. Why couple the back of the body with the front? What have the gat<\/em>-words, so heavy and guttural and black, to do with sex, with its softly inviting s<\/em> and its mysterious final x<\/em>?<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n
These are all fascinating and worthwhile aspects of this book, but I hate to leave without addressing something quite obvious. Coetzee’s youth in South Africa was troubled at all turns by government sponsored racism. In this book, we get mostly confusion, as, for example, in the following passage where Coetzee is watching a black boy on the street:<\/p>\n
So this boy who has unreflectingly kept all his life to the path of nature and innocence, who is poor and therefore good, as the poor always are in fairy-tales, who is slim as an eel and quick as a hare and would defeat him with ease in any contest of swiftness of foot or skill of hand — this boy, who is a living reproof to him, is nevertheless subjected to him in ways that embarrass him so much that he squirms and wriggles his shoulders and does not want to look at him any longer, despite his beauty.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Of course, as always, Coetzee’s skill with language and clarity — even when clarity is painful or coolly distant (as it often\u00a0is when he discusses his parents) — allows for this to be much more than a simple memoir. At its heart it is still concerned with language and with the way language interacts with the world around. It’s an excellent book. And I’ll give a slight spoiler now for my upcoming posts on Youth <\/em>and Summertime<\/em>: they only get better.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Trevor reviews J.M. Coetzee’s Boyhood<\/em>. Read the full post<\/u><\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":5491,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"libsyn-item-id":0,"libsyn-show-id":0,"libsyn-post-error":"","libsyn-post-error_post-type":"","libsyn-post-error_post-permissions":"","libsyn-post-error_api":"","playlist-podcast-url":"","libsyn-episode-thumbnail":"","libsyn-episode-widescreen_image":"","libsyn-episode-blog_image":"","libsyn-episode-background_image":"","libsyn-post-episode-category-selection":"","libsyn-post-episode-player_use_thumbnail":"","libsyn-post-episode-player_use_theme":"","libsyn-post-episode-player_height":"","libsyn-post-episode-player_width":"","libsyn-post-episode-player_placement":"","libsyn-post-episode-player_use_download_link":"","libsyn-post-episode-player_use_download_link_text":"","libsyn-post-episode-player_custom_color":"","libsyn-post-episode-itunes-explicit":"","libsyn-post-episode":"","libsyn-post-episode-update-id3":"","libsyn-post-episode-release-date":"","libsyn-post-episode-simple-download":"","libsyn-release-date":"","libsyn-post-update-release-date":"","libsyn-is_draft":"","libsyn-new-media-media":"","libsyn-post-episode-subtitle":"","libsyn-new-media-image":"","libsyn-post-episode-keywords":"","libsyn-post-itunes":"","libsyn-post-episode-itunes-episode-number":"","libsyn-post-episode-itunes-season-number":"","libsyn-post-episode-itunes-episode-type":"","libsyn-post-episode-itunes-episode-title":"","libsyn-post-episode-itunes-episode-author":"","libsyn-destination-releases":"","libsyn-post-episode-advanced-destination-form-data":"","libsyn-post-episode-advanced-destination-form-data-enabled":"","libsyn-post-episode-advanced-destination-form-data-input-enabled":false,"libsyn-post-episode-premium_state":"","libsyn-episode-shortcode":"","libsyn-episode-embedurl":"","_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[800,19],"tags":[886,915,547],"coauthors":[505],"class_list":["post-5490","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-book-reviews","category-jm-coetzee","tag-1990s","tag-915","tag-nobel-prize"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/03\/Boyhood.jpg?fit=348%2C530&ssl=1","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pqqvZ-1qy","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":false,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5490","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5490"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5490\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":19016,"href":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5490\/revisions\/19016"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/5491"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5490"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5490"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5490"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=5490"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}