Iată un tânăr grețos de rece, pedant, inhibat și timid. Cum din acest aluat iese un laureat al Premiului Nobel pentru literarură e un mare mister. Căutăm rezolvarea misterului în partea a 3-a a trilogiei autobiografice.

Recently, I've been noticing new articles on Coetzee, his name appearing here and there in publications before the upcoming release of his newest book, The Pole, and a few months back I added Youth to my tbr. Last week, at a coffee shop in Volksdorf, just outside of Hamburg, I found a little free library, and the only English-language book on the shelf was a yellowed old copy of Youth. It felt more than a little bit like kismet, the right book falling into my lap at the right time.

The narrator of this "fictional autobiography" is an anxious, overthinking pessimist. He's unlikeable, acts poorly towards women, toward his family, etc. He's young and wants nothing more than to be an artist, to be a poet, so he leaves academia in South Africa (in the tumultuous 1960s) for a computer programming job in London, where he navigates the push/pull between a the bohemian lifestyle a poet and something rigid, predictable, rule-following.

The narrator is so negative, so passive, "killing time while waiting for his destiny to arrive" (moments reminded me of Selin in Batuman's The Idiot, even of Karl Ove Knausgaard on his younger self) --but he has so much desire and longing for a fulfilling artistic life which he imagines to be just outside of his grasp (his uncertainty, derisiveness, judgmental narrow-mindedness is so clearly a product of his own insecurity). He's anxious that if he really tries to become a poet, he'll miss mark, that he'll do it "wrong," he's obsessed with his own suffering, and he blames the divide between his current self and the self he desires to become on his "unchangeable nature," his circumstances, others around him, and is unable to confront his own inhibitions to find fulfillment. At its core, it's this deeply honest and innocent story of desire, wanting, but it's about all the ways the narrator gets in his own way (and he really is, at times, so annoying, frustrating, infuriating, which is of course the point). In the end, is it a sad story? An inevitable one? Did I want him to get over himself and succeed and relax and feel good? And of course, I've ended up reflecting on the ways I do and don't see myself in him (which is a loaded thing to say, I know, because at times he really is shitty lol).

Anyway - here are just a couple of the many quotes I'll be thinking about for a long time!

"Whether mad or miserable, how can one write when tiredness is like a gloved hand gripping one's own brain and squeezing? Or is what he likes to call tiredness in fact a test, a disguised test, a test he is moreover failing? After tiredness, are there further tests to come, as many as there are in circles in Dante's Hell? Is tiredness simply the first of the tests that the great masters had to pass, Hölderlin and Blake, Pound and Eliot? He wishes it could be granted to him to come alive and just for a minute, just for a second, know what it is to burn with the sacred fire of art."

"What more is required than a kind of stupid, insensitive doggedness, as lover, as writer, together with a readiness to fail and fail again? What is wrong with him is that he is not prepared to fail."

"Coatzee explores ... with tenderness and clarity" goes the blurb. Odd then, that I feel like I'm being clobbered into concussion by a man made of stone.

So why do I like him so much?

There are the obvious reasons: terse prose (Seamus?), short and sweet; and despite what I just said, there is great clarity, the kind usually only present in poetry.

But there is more. He is pitiless of people in all four of the novels I've read so far, often describing them in harsh ways, almost cruel.

So it is a hardened eye that we are seeing through, yet empathy is still clearly present. This empathy however, refuses compassion (pity) and, having nowhere else to go, ends up in a kind of stony solidarity instead. A much better direction in my opinion.

I don't think his books could have been written by anyone other than an Afrikaner.

Ah, to be welcomed back into the eloquent polished sheen of Coetzee’s prose. So quickly I join the young man leaving the smothering mother’s grasp, himself now grasping to evolve into the blossom of poetry. From South Africa to London where culture thrives and he sees himself entering.

What he finds is a wait. He awaits. Waiting is what he does. His performance. A woman will notice him and see all the magic of his creativity locked within his stiff posture and muffled gestures. She will unlock what he knows is there but is knotted.

The knot cinched tight consists of strands of webbing. He has cultured the art of self criticism locking himself in while locking others out. This leaves him protected but passive. In effect keeping himself safe by keeping others out. He is a pro. No one enters justifying his beliefs of self criticism completing the circle of his diving further down into his passive withdrawal.

I couldn’t wait to follow Coetzee removing strand by strand, the ups and downs, John staging the battle to free himself. But…But…But… it didn’t happen. A set piece. A concert where the same note is played over and over again, at the end no one sure whether to stand and applaud or walk out. I found the aisle and walked out. John continued in his self constructed rut. This short novel gave the experience of what it is like to be trapped by one’s own undoing but nothing more. The fact that our protagonist has the same name as the author, for me now looking back, shows Coetzee’s own battle writing this piece. The piece becoming a piece about itself?

Reading J.M. Coetzee's work is somewhat exhausting. No matter how you're psyched to think you're in the same current stage in life to master reading a masterpiece, you'll eventually left dumbfounded and coerced to rethink what's come to the life of the character that is hard to articulate. Or maybe their life, even so much different than yours, can be terrifyingly comprehensible and it's unbearable not to weight on their decisions as if they were yours to bear. Writing such wonderful characters is truly Coetzee's purest gift.

The main character in this book is arrogant, idealistic, ignorant and self-absorbed as may him be called out. He is desperately trying to escape from whose life he is living in by over-analysing everything comes between who he is and the definition of what he wants to be -- the great poet. His existence depends on the ideal meaning he's craving to trap himself into. The belief that his life is destined for something much greater than he is at the moment manifests him and fosters his ignorance. While, so many conditions: racial and historical influence hinder his dreams, or what he believes that he could acquire; the ability to write, love and care for the other human beings. All those are missing throughout the flood of social dilemma, racial bias, xenophobia, and most of all concluded as the sense of alienation by leaving for the motherland to live in the foreign country with the heart full of false hope.

Yep, it's pretty much like reading about a white man's delusional crippled mind with the psychoanalysis approach and so many literary criticism which, I could say, is the major fondness I have for this book. His taste for poetry is pretty much the same as mine. Lol.

From the book cover:
Set against the background of the 1960's - Sharpeville and the Cuban Missile Crisis, Vietnam - Youth is a remarkable portrait of a consciousness, isolated and adrift, turning in on itself. J.M Coetzee explores a young man's struggle to find his way in the world with tenderness and a fierce clarity.

Hmmm.

When I first started reading this book my first thought was, Dawsons Creek, with aspergers set in the 1960's. To much youthful angst and introverted navel gazing highlighted by a tumult of excessive adjectives to describe every thought, every hope, every breath, every aspiration (see what i did there?).

Youth is a study of a man who spends too much time believing that he was destined for better things and over analysing the fact that instead of being born as the 1960's answer Voltaire or Flaubert, he is in fact a computer programmer. A wordy testament to the fact that as we get older most of us realise that we are not going to set the world on fire and get on with simply living.The last four lines of the book were a great summary. Not convinced it deserved a place on the 1001 books list and I've since read other Coetzee books which I liked a lot more.

I wonder if I have ever hated the protagonist of a story as much as I do this "John". He is horrifyingly misogynistic, self-indulgent, and wholly unpleasant - and I didn't get the sense Coetzee was trying to do anything subversive with that. It was the typical self-centred, "feeling sorry for themselves" male voice that we really don't need any more of.

There were moments of clarity I enjoyed. It certainly captures the aimlessness of being young, the way as a young adult you can be lured into thinking oneself more special than one actually. It also wonderfully captures the sense of being foreign and out if place.

But ultimately all of that lead nowhere, just spiralled into itself in a tiresome, navel gazing sludge. It was almost unbearable to read towards the end. If it wasn't so short I wouldn't have finished it.

Este libro me atrapó desde la primera página. Le doy mucho valor a Coetzee no solamente por su prosa sencilla y fluida sino por la sinceridad que hay en sus páginas. Me parece difícil escribir sobre uno mismo (en tercera persona) sin caer en las justificaciones.

Es un coming of age que abarca desde los 18 a los 24 años, tiene mucho valor por las reflexiones que hace sobre: trabajo, nacionalidad, xenofobia, política y por sobre todo el amor y el ejercicio del arte.
También le doy puntos extras por narrar el mundo (de mierda) de la programación y ese ambiente frio de oficina y frio donde te prometen salir a las 5 de la tarde, pero salís a las 10 pensando que estas haciendo algo productivo realmente con tu vida. Ya que Coetzee fue un escritor sin privilegio que dividió su vida generando ingresos para poder dedicarse al ejercicio del arte al mismo tiempo.

Tuve momentos que no supe como juzgar a Coetzee (spoiler alerts) cuando narra que no existe ninguna escritora buena salvo Emily Bronte (evidenciando lo poco que leyó mujeres porque Charlotte era mejor que la hermana) y otros donde trata a las mujeres desconsideradamente, pero creo que es valiente decir las cosas como las sintió en ese momento en lugar de tener una corrección política falsa. También hubo momentos donde sintió que una mujer no ser quería acostar con él, pero el tampoco estaba seguro de si quería hacerlo con ellas. Y es esto el aire que perdura en toda la novela/biografía: un hombre que va con la corriente, dejando arrastrar, preguntándose todo el tiempo que hace y porque lo hace, pero sin encontrar muchas respuestas —así se siente la juventud—, que te da la impresión que esta muy desorientado o cansado para luchar y es observador del pasar de su propia vida.

Estupendo. Coetzee escribe para ti, que estudiaste matemáticas o alguna otra carrera de ciencias y ahora pasas las horas en una tecnológica; que viniste a la gran ciudad donde sucede todo, aunque a ti no te pase nada; que piensas que para ser poeta es mejor no morirse de hambre, que no sabes bailar, que se te dan fatal las mujeres y que no entiendes los sentimientos, ni los tuyos ni los de los demás y que, para ser tan listo, no lo eres tanto como los mejores. Coetzee escribe para ti y te dice que así, como es tu vida, fue su juventud.

Youth, J.M. Coetzee
What does it take to be a character in a novel? I mean, what does it take to simply catch the attention of a novelist who is sitting at a cafe, with a drink of his/her choice, pondering over a certain line that is stuck in between the served breakfast on the table and the cigarette between the fingers? While reading Youth, I kept reiterating this particular question, and most importantly, I looked for an answer. I just did not let the question hover around meaninglessly in the deep dark recess of my mind. I begged for an answer all the more as the novel progressed, taking the nameless protagonist from Cape Town to London.
You see the youth in question—the protagonist of the novel—remains too ordinary to be a character. Yes, he is blessed with a certain sense and sensibility that makes him irrevocably sensitive, but deep down he remains a self-centred, selfish boy who is misogynistic and ungrateful. His treatment of himself, that enforces a cloud of loneliness around him, does not evoke pity. I do not sympathize with his miserable state of life. Sympathizing would amount to, what Coetzee calls, ignominy. At the same time, it is true that during the formative years of a boy’s life, he is unconsciously patriarchal and misogynistic. His treatment of women is in compliance with the dominant discourse of patriarchy in our quotidian society. Even if the youth is presented with this benefit of doubt, blaming not him but the society that nurtured him, one cannot reconcile with his treatment of his mother. At times, I felt that perhaps he is allergic to the presence of the opposite gender. That is not the case, unfortunately. His ungratefulness does not go unaccounted. As a reader, I hated him when he refused to thank the only family which invited him for a meal. As a reader I hated him, when he refused to take a stand and left his country amidst political turmoil. Yes, he is insecure about himself. He wants to be a poet. And a poet is never politically correct, at least not always. But that does not mean an aspiring poet has the liberty to hurt others and wallow in self-degradation just to experience misery—misery which would contribute to his art.
As a novel, Youth sets a definite tone. That comes naturally to Coetzee. He is perhaps the single greatest writer, writing at present in English. I sincerely hope that the character here is not a persona of the novelist himself. Perhaps he met a boy, caught in the corner of a street who has forgotten which lamplight would direct him to the road that takes him home. Best poets are born at home—those who sat in their study, and read and wrote so much that the wood had entered their soul.

Lot of early 20s angst but I’m a sucker for Coetzee’s writing

This book is about many things; coming of age, struggle of artist, balance between steady paying job and creative time. It doesn't sound great review I see it myself. But as a reader we tend to observe what is most related to us. If I was an aspiring artist whose spirit is being crushed under 9 to 5 jobs, it will spoke to me most. If I was rooting myself in another country and trying to rewrite my whole history without any past connection, it will also spoke to me.

Professional reviewer (which I am not) will have to cover all those nitpicking items; characters, storyline, writing style and all those gripping items that writer use to keep readers reading and finish off the book. But I am not fancy reader who come up with a clever thing. No. I don't have it.

But what I can write honestly in here is why I did finish off the book and what mostly related to me.

I'm also an aspiring writer. That is far too stretched. I am aspiring to be writer. Nothing I have done is published ever. No one ever read it. You may ask why ever not? I don't f****** care whether you do ask or not. But this small piece of World Wide Web here is my space and I'll write whatever I want. Thank you very much.
Now back to the question, because things I have written are shits. It doesn't read like all those bestselling authors. I doesn't ever read smoothly. Those are like a thorny rose bush that you can't take rose from it without pricking your fingers.

And it is not your usual inspirational novel. In here, it doesn't have all those cheezzzy romance where man and woman look at each other and zinggg they fell in love. In here, it doesn't have a hero crippled with childhood trauma. Not in extreme way. It is part of him. Our man is a stolid creature. He imagines all sorts of things, where all those fanciful ideas take our mind and fly high to the imaginative realm where you are a lost heiress or misplaced fairy. And there is moment where reality almost crushed him. But as I said our man is steady. He lands on his feet. In the end of book he was ready to step out from safety to creative world.

What can we ask more? It inspired, it related to me in many ways. In some moments I believed myself as stolid as our narrator. So much fun!!