Youth: Scenes from Provincial Life II
J. M. Coetzee
Language: English
Pages: 176
ISBN: 0142002003
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
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.
when what standing by her will mean in reality fills him with foreboding, when his whole impulse is to drop the telephone and run away? The pause comes to an end. She has the name, she continues, of someone who will take care of the problem. She has accordingly made an appointment for the next day. Is he prepared to drive her to the place of appointment and bring her back afterwards, since she has been advised that after the event she will be in no state to drive? Her name is Sarah. Her friends
the Reading Room does not open; between now and next Saturday, reading will be a matter of an hour snatched here and there of an evening. Should he soldier on until closing time, though he is racked with yawns? What is the point of this enterprise anyway? What is the good to a computer programmer, if computer programming is to be his life, to have an MA in English literature? And where are the unrecognized masterpieces that he was going to uncover? Mr Humpty Dumpty is certainly not one of them.
Monica Vitti a year ago. Since it is not a highbrow film, or not obviously so, just a story about a gang of incompetent, amateurish criminals, he sees no reason why Marianne should not enjoy it. Marianne is not a complainer, but throughout the film he can sense her fidgeting beside him. When he steals a glance, she is picking her fingernails, not watching the screen. Didn't you like it, he asks afterwards? I couldn't work out what it was about, she replies. It turns out she has never seen a film
in all, when he adds up the monies, he is comfortably off-comfortably enough to pay his rent and university fees and keep body and soul together and even save a little. He may only be nineteen but he is on his own feet, dependent on no one. The needs of the body he treats as a matter of simple common sense. Every Sunday he boils up marrowbones and beans and celery to make a big pot of soup, enough to last the week. On Fridays he visits Salt River market for a box of apples or guavas or whatever
in the poet's life, all of them, in the testing of his soul. Similarly Aldermaston - the wretched cubicle in which he works, with its plastic furniture and its view on to the back of a furnace, the armed man at his back - can be regarded simply as experience, as a further stage in his journey into the depths. It is a justification that does not for a moment convince him. It is sophistry, that is all, contemptible sophistry. And if he is further going to claim that, just as sleeping with Astrid