John has a definition of what youth should be (unimaginable transformation via love, sex, poetry) so he can only live it in the negative (in wait for unimaginable transformation via love, sex, poetry). The “signal event,” when it arrives, is rather illegible to John, because he is just sitting alone on a patch of green enjoying a moment of ecstatic union with existence. Miserable still after, he recurses back to his frustrated sense that life is not happening for him, that life will not happen for someone like him. Even misery, repeating in its compulsive patterns, evolves; although at the end of this installment John suffers from the same deprivations and hatreds he assails himself with at the beginning, they have ineffably gestated.

"هذا الوضع يصيبه بالغثيان والاشمئزاز من بدايته إلى نهايته، فالقوانين في حد ذاتها، ورجال الشرطة المجرمون، والحكومة التي تدافع علنًا عن القتلة وتندد بقتلى التظاهرات، والصحافة التي تخشى أن تقول الحق أو تصف ما يمكن أن يراه كل ذي عينين".

me: can we get portrait of the artist as a young man
coetzee: we have portrait of the artist as a young man at home
the portrait at home: dull attempt at narrating a journey of self development and growth (usually compelling topic!) with such bland writing it couldn’t even make a sexuality crisis interesting. i don’t usually complain about narratives where the stakes are “low” (i swear you don’t have to be saving the earth for me to find your story interesting) but this just feels like a bunch of nothing on top of more nothing. it’s leading nowhere. there were some okay reflections on art and life but they are so sporadic and unrelated to anything that i can’t really take them into account. idk. just one more to go i guess. (also if he mentions pound one more time i will jump out the window)

i get where he’s coming from but the misogyny left a bad taste in my mouth

Youth is a half-fictionalised autobiographical novel by J. M. Coetzee, a South African-born writer who left a politically unstable South Africa in 1960 and came to London.
John - the protagonist is a young man with aspirations to become a poet or at least a writer, graduated in mathematics and English before flying to London. He has dreams to lead a life like his favourites poets Ezra Pound, Rimbaud or Eliot but he needs to earn money too pretty fast after arriving in London. First he is offered a job as a scientist but this job requires him to leave London. He can’t abandon his city of ideas, where he thinks and hopes to meet a beautiful girl and write his poetry. Instead, he decides to work for IBM as a computer programmer. There were no computers in South Africa but he worked really hard at school and hopes to earn his keeping and creates poetry in his spare time. Soon enough he realises that this job requires from him much more time and energy, no matter how much he thinks about Elliot’s carrier in the bank he can’t stand being a soulless clerk in crappy clothes.

“Poetry is not a turning loose of emotions but an escape from emotions,’ says Eliot in words he copied into his diary. ‘poetry is not an expression of personality but an escape from personality.’ Then after bitter afterthought Eliot adds: “But only those who have personality and emotions know what is means to want to escape from these things.”

Really likes this novel, full of musing over literature and beginning of work as a computer programmer in London.

يا إلهي ما هذا الجمال لقد وقعت في حب جون كويتزي

Có vẻ tương đồng với văn chương của ông trong khoảng thời gian gần sau này. Nếu Tuổi thơ kể về cái yếu mềm lúc nhỏ, thì Tuổi trẻ là thời thanh niên 20 bỏ lại tất cả ở Nam Phi để dấn bước sang Anh, sống vững vàng trên một hòn đảo không cần cha mẹ sau sự kiện Sharpeville bi thảm.

Nhưng vẫn thế. Cái bạc nhược luôn theo sau ông, bạc nhược vì trốn nghĩa vụ chiến tranh, bạc nhược vì chối bỏ trách nhiệm làm cha và hàng hà những nghĩa vụ cấp thiết khác trong đời sống một người đàn ông, một người nghệ sĩ mà ông luôn khao khát trở thành. Đây cũng là khoảng thời gian những tự vấn của một người nghệ sĩ thành hình. Giữa tình nghệ sĩ, giữa cảm hứng tắt ngấm, giữa đường cùng công việc kiếm tiền và những ngẫu hứng tràn trề nghệ thuật...

Tuổi trẻ như áng văn giãi bày về khoảng thời gian khó khăn trong nỗi suy tư làm cách nào tự bản thân trở nên quan trọng, để phản ánh thời đại, để trở thành một nghệ sĩ thực thụ như Picasso, như Pound, như Eliot trong đời sống vật chất lên cao. Chưa ai dũng cảm như J.M. Coetzee để phơi bày mình ra trước ánh mắt phán xét tận cùng của xã hội này như ông, trước đó và cả sau này dường như và sẽ chưa bao giờ có.

Primera vez que leo a Coetzee, más por azar que por voluntad. A pesar de ser una obra menor, parte de su autobiografía novelizada, disfruté bastante el libro. Espero volver por una de sus grandes obras.

How do bitter and twisted, lonely, emotionally crippled older men start out? Men whose relationships, if any, have always soured early, men whose jobs are all that sustain them, mediocre jobs with colleagues who never become friends. Men whose strict weekend routines stop loneliness from being more than an uneasy feeling which never quite comes to the surface. Never quite acknowledged.

They start out as bitter and twisted Youth. In this novel by Coetzee, we see the establishment of such a being, a young man who thinks somehow that his cold alienating ways will make him a poet. When it turns out that he has nothing more in him than the capacity to be a computer programmer, and an undistinguished one of those, he sees his future as a hollow meaningless thing. We do not find out if his life remained the mean and nasty existence he portended.

Enter Nagasaki. Here we meet a man who might be the person Youth foresaw. Towards the end of his nondescript career he is alone, as far as we know he has never had a meaningful relationship with anybody, including his relations. When not at work he is at home, when at home, the person he talks to is himself. He has no friends, no interests, nothing about him justifies his carbon footprint. Like Youth, he is given the opportunity to live, to behave with largesse, to give. Like Youth he cannot do that. Both of them experience discomfort, unease at their utter meanness of spirit, but neither is capable of being a new person.

Is this inevitable? Enter Mr Stone of Mr Stone and the Knights Companion.

rest here: https://alittleteaalittlechat.wordpre...

O cenário é outro, e o narrador se percebe cada vez mais deslocado em outros lugares. Livro do meio inconclusivo, justamente por ser trilogia, mas poderia ter sido melhor explorado e desenvolvido.

With the second volume in his “autobiography” trilogy, J.M. Coetzee’s Youth is even more candid than its predecessor Boyhood in offering Coetzee’s recollections of his young adulthood. In another short but remarkable memoir, he is again confessional, solemn, and melancholy, but also he demonstrates his ability to have dark and caustic humor when remembering his past.

The “scenes” he recounts focus on his determination to leave behind the disgrace and unrest of apartheid in South Africa for the hopeful opportunity of pursuing his dream in London to become the next great writer. He channels classic poets such as Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot in efforts to summon the muse, but once in London his ability to write proves more challenging than he expected.

Instead of finding the abundance of time and motivation he needs, whereby the profundity of his ideas pours forth onto the page, he is trapped in the mundane necessity of having to work as a computer programmer to survive. Unsatisfying love affairs and an inability to find his voice leave him questioning and wondering when and how he may ever initiate his yearning to write.

Youth is a mesmerizing narrative about a young man willing himself to become a writer amid serious self-doubt and constant setbacks. Even with such a compact book, Coetzee demonstrates his ability to offer a vast breadth and intensity of ideas. In reliving for us his struggles, it’s inspiring for anyone with a dream to hear from one of the great writers of the late 20th and early 21st centuries how he ultimately overcame his self-identified failures.

How to tell the story of a life? Life is: books, art, sex, moving, school and institutions, and the interior life: fear of ignominy, hierarchies of learning (pure math over applied math; scorning the authors that authors you admire disdain), the feeling of belonging or lack thereof.

Is the narrator aware of the limits of "his" 3rd person main character? The narrowness of some of that character's views on life and women and art? Are we meant to take John's analyses at face value? Or is Youth a self knowing allegory of a maturity that seems full but is actually only part? John contemplates the greatest art but is still as lost as one can be about how to live.

However narrow and single-minded John's worldview, the novel is a reminder that worldviews are tended, like plants in a garden. They're planted with art and reading and teachings of all kinds and fertilized with experience. I can look down on John for being overly deterministic and foolish about both poetry and women; and yet I admire him for actively tending to coherent theories about any part of the world, and giving real import to what his working theories say about his own life. This kind of interior moral life which is all wrapped up in an artistic life - it's familiar to me. And my own tendency is toward nihilistic chaos to soothe me from even trying to be moral or be an artist. When I reflect quietly, I don't believe in nihilism. When I flip the channels and swiftly scroll through the feeds, I let it run me.