I believed every word and was completely captured by the author’s storytelling that is raw and brutally honest. I read this is considered ‘fictional memoir’, which doesn’t change my opinion- he takes you into his psyche and wrestles with his struggles of youth from his vantage point. Utterly fascinating.

This was irritating yet compelling. It felt selfish and pointless until the end. I don’t know whether to hate or love it. But it’s a good memoir and it does well capturing how children think

"There is another first memory, one that he trusts more fully but would never repeat, certainly not to Greenberg and Goldstein, who would trumpet it around the school and turn him into a laughing stock.

He is sitting beside his mother in a bus. It must be cold, for he is wearing red woollen leggings and a woollen cap with a bobble. The engine of the bus labours; they are ascending the wild and desolate Swartberg Pass.

In his hand is a sweet-wrapper. He holds the wrapper out of the window, which is open a crack. It flaps and trembles in the wind.

‘Shall I let go?’ he asks his mother.

She nods. He lets it go.

The scrap of paper flies up into the sky. Below there is nothing but the grim abyss of the pass, ringed with cold mountain peaks. Craning backwards, he catches a last glimpse of the paper, still bravely flying.

‘What will happen to the paper?’ he asks his mother; but she does not comprehend.

That is the other first memory, the secret one. He thinks all the time of the scrap of paper, alone in all that vastness, that he abandoned when he should not have abandoned it. One day he must go back to the Swartberg Pass and find it and rescue it. That is his duty: he may not die until he has done it."

[Miento si digo que no estuve días (y hasta escribí un examen) sobre este fragmento de la primera parte de la no-autobiografía de J.M. Coetzee.]

Un país fragmentado sobre el que este niño pierde su inocencia, un deseo de volver a recordar (en el que el recuerdo se confunde con lo que se quiere recordar) y la fragilidad de todos aquellos que recuerdos que desenvolvemos y a los que perdemos la pista por el camino. Poético, triste, divertido, incluso con ciertos toques eróticos (queer?) en ciertos pasajes del libro... cada (re)lectura desvela algo nuevo sobre este cuestionamiento de la identidad con el que Coetzee, siempre tan brillante y—sin él quererlo—conmovedor, aporta su granito de arena a esta farsa tan mágica y tan apasionante como es la autoficción. Una autoficción que, asimismo, se mezcla y confunde con una tímida novela de reconstrucción de la memoria histórica del Apartheid desde la mirada de un niño blanco y confundido que no encuentra su lugar en el recreo.

En resumidas cuentas, Boyhood (y las escenas de la vida provinciana en general) es un verdadero regalo para el lector, una especie de contestación literaria al célebre "Ceci N'est Pas Une Pipe" de Magritte que se reescribe en forma de "Ceci N'est Pas Un Autobiography" ante los ojos incrédulos de los lectores.

بعد از مدت ها دوباره به سراغ کوتزی رفتم،زندگی و زمانه‌ی مایکل کی بسیار عالی هست اما اقای فو چندان نظر من رو جلب نکرد.
اما این کتاب رو که شروع کردم ، روایت خیلی خوبی داشت و یک نفس تا انتها ادامه دادمش ، از بُعد بصری که تصویر سازی می‌کردم یاد فیلم پسرانگی می‌افتادم.
هم زندگی‌نامه‌ی خوبی هست هم روایت خوبی داره و هم سوژه‌ی همیشگی مولف (اپارتاید) در اون هست.

Mi ci è voluto un po’ per penetrare lo stile refrattario, monocorde e feroce di Coetzee.
E non direi nemmeno di esserci riuscito del tutto.

Ci sono pochissimi dialoghi a delineare il rapporto tempestoso coi genitori, quello con i parenti, l’esperienza scolastica.
Le questioni preponderanti dell’identità e della religione.

Anche se in certi momenti ho pensato “non fa per me, potrei pure fermarmi qui”, in realtà alla fine ammetto di aver subìto un certo fascino e credo leggerò altro di suo. [70/100]

A review of one of Coetzee's novel on the cover of this book says something to the effect that Coetzee will never comfort, but he will always tell the truth. I've read Coetzee as a study of shame and always attached that to the history of South Africa. This memoir, Boyhood, with unflinching honesty takes us into Coetzee's home, where shame is more personal and less (but not completely a-)political. Coetzee, here and in his novels demands an honest and unflinching eye, a willingness to bear witness to our true dark and secret hearts. In return a reader will know herself, and the world, a little more deeply, a little more honestly. It's a big payoff, if you can take it.

Buf.

Es un libro que me sorprendió. Fue mi primera experiencia de lectura con este autor y no me decepcionó. Siento que es un libro que se puede recomendar porque nos habla a todos de esas formas de vivir la infancia, que cuestiona sobre la familia y las formas de percibir el mundo en el que se va creciendo desde la niñez.

The central boyhood of Boyhood is defined largely by those twin poles, apprehension and excitement, that seem to be the elemental tenants of childhood (though perhaps this is just because Coetzee so skillfully conveys the specific as to seem universal, and because these specifics are so close to the particulars of my own life). Both fall under the umbrella of curiosity, skewed by anticipation of either good or ill, and of curiosity’s cousin confusion. It’s one of the mysteries of childhood that while one may retain memories of near-constant terror and bewilderment, they nevertheless don’t scan as entirely negative, or even largely so; indeed confusion is a state that allows for wonder and for exploration and realization, at least until one reaches John’s age and sees dawning comprehension all around while none exists internally. Coetzee perfectly captures the appeal of seeing exposed, even without accompanying understanding, confirmation of that which one has always intuitively sensed in the world around them: “each day seemed to bring new revelations of the cruelty and pain and hatred raging beneath the everyday surface of things. [. . .] [T]he passion and fury of those days gripped him; he was shocked but he was greedy too to see more, to see all there was to see.”

John observes and carefully itemizes little details of life, and is particularly attracted to those little details which contain hints of violence (and which border on what some might consider unseemliness), like trails of ants being sucked up a vacuum and the blood running over his mother’s fingers as she cuts chicken. His careful attention is part of an unending pursuit of some deterministic pattern that might explain everything going on around him; the rules of the world are utterly unclear to him whenever expectations and scenarios are not made perfectly clear and explicit, and desperately-desired normalcy is out of reach as a result, so he seeks isolation, keeping his life a series of careful secrets from the world, prudently and privately enduring his dutiful shame as a penance of sorts as he tries to puzzle out why certain manifestations of violence and implicit sexuality are acceptable, even desirable and alluring, in certain settings—corporal punishment during school, rough-housing between boys after school—but not others, and why the personal freedoms of women and minorities are so hindered. (The longing of adults for freedom in Boyhood is an enduringly bleak suggestion that John’s longing for same will not be relieved with his coming of age.) But even if changing to become normal weren’t so impossible, John would be unwilling to do so, as he sees change as an ontological conundrum. “In that case he would no longer be himself. If he were no longer himself, what point would there be in living?” This is an example of a degree of self-awareness that is almost painful when you realize how agonizing it must have been for him to live with a heightened sensitivity to internal conundrums like this one, the realization of the contradictions that crop up in his rigid self-definitions, and the knowledge of the pain he causes himself and others; all his knowledge is of the kind that would be precisely least useful and most painful to him in life. “[A] state of disarray” is how Coetzee perfectly categorizes the mental anguish and frenzy into which John continually contorts himself.

John’s perception of himself is as not much more significant than one of the ants he watches be sucked up by the vacuum; he compares himself at various points to a scuttling beetle, a lizard, a generic wild animal (again scuttling), “a poor bewildered baboon” in a cage, “a crab pulled out of its shell, pink and wounded and obscene.” (The only animalistic trait he doesn’t have is the indifference to privacy.) He justifies his mercilessness and coldness towards the world as being no worse than that which he directs towards himself. His opinion of himself is that he is not worthy of notice by default, but he is nevertheless delighted on the rare instance that he gets any; when he he is saved from drowning by his Scout troop leader, he recalls it for weeks. “[E]ach time it strikes him how wonderful it is that Michael should have noticed—noticed him, noticed that he was failing;” even just to be noticed for his ineptitude is highly desirable and nearly unbelievable. John goes on to note how it would have been quite understandable for Michael to not have seen (or, it’s hinted, to “not have seen”), and certainly less of a hassle to simply be able to write his parents explaining the death. It’s clear he views himself as having been unworthy of having his life (of which he already believes he’s unworthy to begin with) saved; he treats the moment as a resurrection, less because of the saving of his life and more because of the attention—gratuitous, as he sees it—paid him.

The attention he does get in life is nearly entirely from his parents, as displeasing to him as not receiving it from elsewhere, because of all the guilt in his life, perhaps the greatest is that he has cost his parents their lives, an unescapable and irreversible fact that will directly haunt his entire life, by the very nature of its coming into existence. Their love for him he views as the sort of baffling and irrational passion out of mere obligation that he is expected to feel (but doesn’t) for South African athletes and South African allies in the geopolitical sphere; he prefers baffling and irrational passions of a different sort, such as his affinity with Roman Catholicism, which comes about because of an attempt to lie and give the correct answer as to his religion and despite his continued atheism. He hopes and wishes his parents would renounce him, freeing him of their obligation (though not him of the guilt for the lives he’s already cost them) or that perhaps he will die—he idolizes Titus Oates of Robert Falcon Scott’s British Antarctic Expedition, “the man with frostbite who, because he was holding up his companions, went out into the night, into the snow and ice, and perished quietly, without fuss. He hopes he can be like Titus Oates one day.” His only chance to benefit others, he realizes, will be through his absence. (He also, for example, fantasizes about charging gallantly to a certain death like the cavalrymen of the Light Brigade; the appeal is less the gallantry than the death.)

Given that he’s already perplexed by the basics of existence and interpersonal relationships, it shouldn’t be a surprise that this further complications his relationships with his parents, each a tortured balance that he attempts to maintain at a distinct equilibrium point, but which nevertheless are overridden, sometimes in unison, by parental impulses and actions beyond his understanding. He is nearly as much beyond his own understanding, and thus is as helpless as his mother when, for example, he talks to his mother about his obsessions and “he sees the desperation in her eyes: she knows these things are important, and wants to understand why, but cannot.” It’s similarly wrenching when he attempts to celebrate an occurrence with his father, but in his dual uncertainty of how to properly express joy or interact with his father, he reacts in a way that “puzzles and disturbs” even himself, to say nothing of his father, in an incident that calls to mind John van Ruysbroeck's words: "I must rejoice beyond the bounds of time . . . though the world may shudder at my joy, and in its coarseness know not what I mean." (The apparently inexplicable violence of the act, like that of others of John’s, suggests an attempt to convey through pain the sharpness of his heightened mental state, which more typically is one of pain itself.) He is left hoping the specific incident won’t repeat itself, but the underlying implication is that he would also prefer not to experience joy or to attempt to express such emotion to his father (or anyone) ever again, as it could presumably only lead to another equally unsuccessful effort at expression. This repression of emotion leads one to suspect that the (tacit) expression in this book of gratefulness and sorriness towards his parents might never have been manifested until its writing.

This is one of many effective gains that come from Coetzee’s distancing use of the third-person to deliver what is, as far as one can presume, autobiographical material (according to the LC categorization), though in a 2002 interview, Coetzee opined that “all autobiography is autre-biography”, and that “[g]enre definitions—at least those definitions employed by ordinary readers—are quite crude.” At any rate, the “he” of Boyhood is necessarily fictional at least in the usual ways of autobiography—by virtue of being a memory, by definition distanced and unreliable and itself only a reflection of what was only internal perception to begin with. But Cetzee’s deliberate separation of the narrator from the protagonist (and potentially of himself from the narrator) also highlights the ways in which it can often be difficult for people to reconcile their younger selves with the people they later become. It also permits Coetzee to be both cruel and compassionate to young John in a way that might only be possible after such dissociation, and to reveal things about “himself” that he might never reveal about himself, even now unwilling to let go of his carefully-constructed privacy. He never, however, takes advantage of this to turn his narrative into self-pitying; despite the fact that his life would lend itself to a certain despondency characteristic of the school of kitchen sink realism that bled from British literature to that of the rest of the Commonwealth, he is careful to observe that it only resembles such familiar patterns because of the coloring of his own fears and perceptions, and thus the reader sympathizes instead of pities the protagonist—not that Coetzee asks for either. He doesn’t ask one to relate to or associate oneself with the narrator either; I happened to deeply relate to nearly every sentiment expressed, but the genius of the work is that one’s appreciation doesn’t depend on that at all, and in fact any such relation has to overcome Coetzee’s protections against too-easy audience identification. Coetzee the author acts as an intermediary of sorts, absolving and showing compassion to his younger self so that we don’t feel the need to and so that he can be presented without special pleading or, for example, attempts to make the irrational aspects of the protagonist seem rational. These efforts, though, the fact that Coetzee’s not asking for them, makes one’s associations with and tender feelings towards John feel even more authentic, and more wrenching. (The various acts of distancing also allows relating readers to extend warmer feelings towards a proxy for themselves than they would towards their actual selves.)

Just as he strips away standard authorial manipulations from the emotional architecture of the book and enables a more direct response to the content, so does Coetzee deliver pared-down prose that reads so crisply and clearly that it almost feels delivered in pure word form, without even punctuation. Somehow, it has a clean, pure feeling, like filtered air. (This is not the only way in which Coetzzee seems to transcend the senses which he appeals to; there is, for example, a stunning passage, absolutely inexplicable in its effect, in which the sound is so precisely designed and described in words as to actually imitate the effect of ambient sound starkly dropping out in reality.) The old maxims about showing and not telling are reduced even further than usual to meaningless pablum by what Coetzee is able to artfully express through direct exposition. He rarely includes direct dialogue, as if he doesn’t trust himself to remember it exactly, which gives the effect of highlighting that which is reproduced as having, one imagines, seared his mind. Other parts are told, not shown, because he only hears vague rumors of things he doesn’t understand; some need be told explicitly because he has desires which he doesn’t even know the real-world applications of—much of his understanding of the world, though sophisticated in many ways, is limited to existing in the abstract at best. Of course, Coetzee shows too, and shows magnificently, in case there was any doubt that he could.

Coetzee caps Boyhood in splendid fashion, leaving John in a position of consciously trying to remember his memories, wondering about the fate of books and accumulated wisdoms, and worrying that no one else will remember, care, worry, once more needlessly piling the weight of the world on himself. But as throughout the book, we are given positive undertones to accompany this existential scenario that so well integrates threads we’ve seen running through the entire narrative. While at first glance, the ending seems like the end of his memories, it’s really just the end of those that most desperately needed mining and conveying, those memories manufactured before he fully embraced the import of needing to consciously keep them, and even longer before he undertook the project of creating a book from nothing, an act in direct opposition to the disappearance of books due to negligence. Memories hold a similar important place—maybe even the same place, or at least an overlapping one—once held by his father’s family’s farm, with which he has a relationship which he recognizes to be necessarily impermanent but is nevertheless his only refuge, and one which he creates his own rituals of communion with so as better to extend his relationship. Life has long disappointed John compared to myths and books, but Boyhood ends with him finally equipped to alchemize life into a more meaningful, and more permanent, form. And uniquely equipped to do so—no one else seems to be as open to the world, and besides, even those who are paying attention at all aren't recording it, and certainly not like this.

Aridez emocional refletida em uma vida deslocada e dividida entre dois mundos, duas famílias, duas etnias...
Qual identidade permaneceria intacta após tanta fragmentação? Poderia se chamar um Conto de Duas pessoas.

Coetzee đối với mình luôn thường trực xuất hiện như người đàn ông già mang nỗi cô đơn. Văn chương của ông phần lớn mang sắc thái lạnh, một chút tang tóc của thời đại và một nỗi buồn khơi sâu rất khó định nghĩa. Không hẳn vô tình mà ông là người đầu tiên thắng cả 2 lần giải Booker và Nobel văn học. Ban đầu đọc ông mình rất cảnh giác, cố không để những ảo ảnh hào quang che lấp mất chất văn học, nhưng đọc dần dần từ từ, qua 4 cuốn tiểu thuyết đặc sắc nhất, thì rõ ràng Coetzee là 1 tượng đài mới, sau Doris Lessing và Don DeLillo mà mình vô cùng trân quý.

Văn chương của Coetzee thường gợi lại cái suy tàn, mà nhân vật tàn lụi thường là người đàn ông trung niên, mang cho độc giả một cảm giác ông viết về chính ông. Từ Ruồng bỏ đến Đợi bọn mọi, Coetzee dường như thường trực xuất hiện thông qua văn chương mình. Một motuyp đàn ông mỏng manh, bi lụy; mắc kẹt giữa hệ thống chính quyền công chính và những mối tình tréo ngoe không tên tuổi. Càng về sau này, một khía cạnh khác là chủ nghĩa động vật thường trực xuất hiện, mà đỉnh cao nhất là Ruồng bỏ với loài chó đặt trong cách mạng giành đất đai của người da trắng bởi dân bản địa.

Những cảnh đời tỉnh lẻ là bộ ba tiểu thuyết viết về quá trình trưởng thành của một đứa trẻ họ Coetzee - dường như vì thế người ta coi đây là chuỗi chronical tự thuật của ông. Trong cuốn sách đầu tiên của bộ 3 này, những chủ đề thường trực nhất vẫn luôn xuất hiện: sự yếu đuối của bản thể, sự phong phú trong tầng lớp xã hội Nam Phi và chủ nghĩa động vật. Lần đầu tiên trong văn chương ông, mình thấy một sự bi lụy với người đàn bà mà không phải một người tình, mà ở đây là bà mẹ. Coetzee dường như lần đầu tiên có đủ không gian để khai thác sự phát triển bản thể từ một phôi thai nằm trong bụng mẹ, một sự tiếp nối khởi đầu cho di sản sáng tác của ông sau này.

Tự bản thân nhìn nhận, Tuổi thơ thật sự là ngọn nguồn và những trải lòng suy tư mà nhạy cảm nhất của Coetzee. Một Coetzee ngây ngơ thuần chất, một Coetzee trốn trong lớp vỏ chín chắn của bản thân mình mà quan sát sự đời. Một Coetzee sống trong sự bạo tàn của 3 sắc da Nam Phi. Một Coetzee tiếc thương cho bọn cừu bị mổ. Có cảm giác như với cuốn sách này, trái ngược với tung tích kỳ bí không đến cực đoan như Pychon, nhưng lần đầu tiên Coetzee phơi thân mình dưới ánh mắt dò xét của thế giới. Một cuốn sách trong bộ ba nếu những ai đã từng yêu Ruồng bỏ, Đợi bọn mọi, Người chậm, Giữa miền đất ấy, Thời đồ sắt rất nên đọc.

Once you start to read this book, you won´t be able to stop it. Looking forward for the second volume of this trilogy.

3* Elizabeth Costello
4* Disgrace
4* Waiting for the Barbarians
3* A Ilha
4* The Master of Petersburg
3* Slow Man
4* Age of Iron
4* Boyhood (Scenes from Provincial Life #1)
TR Youth (Scenes from Provincial Life #2)
TR Dusklands
TR Life & Times of Michael K
TR Summertime (Scenes from Provincial Life #3)
TR The Schooldays of Jesus
TR L'Abattoir de verre