The main thing I learned from this book is that it can be worthwhile to re-read a book.

I first read Youth years ago, probably because J.M Coetzee had just won the Nobel, the book was available at my local library and it looked short enough. It was a bleak, uneventful read and I was left unimpressed.

I've started a new bookclub with some friends in Brasil and one of them picked Youth - so I gave it another go. This time around, I really enjoyed it! I understood that Youth is about the male ego in its youth - its pretentiousness, its fears. I could relate completely with the narrator; I remembered things of my own youth, the awkwardness, the aspirations that were so ungrounded on reality.

It's set in the 60s, and it's about a young aspiring poet from Cape Town who flees "backward" South Africa for glamorous London, where he hopes to succeed as an artist. He ends up in a bedsit, working as a temp (I could so relate to this), fuddling along... and that's it. At times it feels autobiographical, at times it feels like Mr Bean.

Semi-autobiographical perhaps, Youth is an at times relentlessly dour portrayal of a callow young man set adrift in a foreign land (Britain) from the provinces (South Africa). Seemingly constitutionally unable to relate to women in any healthy way he fumbles his way through personal relationships unable to connect. Artistically inclined or so he thinks, this proves problematic as well so he ends up as a computer programmer. It's a depressing portrayal of depression, ennui and a lost wandering soul unable to find peace and fulfilment in his life. A true story perhaps of many a young man who knows what he wants but is waylaid by his own personal demons.

I finished this bildungsroman again, after two years to see how far I had come in life. Coetzee's shift from his usual masterful prose to the dreary, plainspeak used in this book captures the fairly unflattering lives that the artist as a young man's portrait can really show. The main character barely has a name, just 'he'.
If the artist expects his company to be sophisticated and rattle off Fellini and Bergman in normal conversation, and Eliot and Pound over dinner, he himself gives very little, either during sex, where he is stiff and is waiting for that one moment and person to unite him with whatever the fuck artistic self-actualization is, or when it is time to write poetry, which he never finds the time to.
The artist in that case can only wait. Wait through his disappointing job as a Computer Programmer where he is looked or in derision. He did manage to sever himself from South Africa and for all the backwardness that it represented, but in England, he is nobody. With his artistic impulse fading away because of his programming job, he has ceased to desire. The position of alienation he occupies by being a speck of dust between England and South Africa is one of the many roads that the young artist takes towards artistic fulfilment and happiness. He plods on, he loses desire, so one day he can effortlessly 'be' poetry in the ilk of Pound.

Omg så relatable nämen det var trevligt att läsa om när han försöker navigera genom livet o hur han ska nå sina mål o om han ens ska uppnå dem. Hans tvivel på sig själv o han ifrågasättande av det han har trott på och informationen o tankarna han har va mkt relatable. Det negativa var att han har en del fördomar och synen på kvinnor var lite questionable men han ifrågasätter dock det senare o han tänker som han gör pga att det är det som han har tolkat från sina idoler. Han har också samma synsätt på det mesta annat, o han utnyttjar o vill att allt ska leda honom till den upplysning som han tror behövs för att bli poet. Han är inte en charmig karaktär o jag håller inte med honom i allt men hans sätt att handskas med misslyckanden o rädsla och ifrågasättandet av sig själv var det jag repaterade mest till

Most of the time while reading this book, I found myself embodied in the life of protagonist. He skips South African race conflict aspiring to be a poet and strolls around London, reads his favorite authors. But he cannot cope up in this new scenario. His frustration and loneliness increases as a computer programmer(He is unable to grab a career of his choice: poetry). His affairs are ephemeral and he ends up a lonely bird. Also being an autobiographical work, Coetzee deeply portrays his artistic insights. He illustrates what it is to be an African and Indian in West and how poets and authors of post colonial parts and third world are being voiceless in so called English Literature. This book is specially about the struggle of a non-western youth in west.

I fell madly in love with Coetzee after reading his novel "Disgrace". This is my second book by him. I am fan of his powerful writing style. After reading this book, he has gained much of my respect.

Plot summary: “In a perfect world he would sleep only with perfect women [...]. But he knows no such women.” (page 32)

Language-wise, the book was very enjoyable: the main character´s melancholic thoughts, his desire to fit in, start over in a foreign country, to pursue a career as a poet. However, his life in London turns out to be not as exciting as he hoped for. He is stuck in a boring work, goes on random dates every now and then, observes how the Londoners live their life, walk in the parks while thinking about his own life. The guy wants desperately to find his soul mate, but she is still there somewhere, out of reach. Interestingly enough, all female characters were judged by their looks: either they were described as pure perfections (hardly ever) or unpleasant (usually this was the case).

“He visits Ilse [his cousin] in the nursing home. All his hopes are dashed. She is not a beauty, not even tall, just an ordinary moon-faced girl with mousy hair who wheezes when she talks.” (p. 127) Poor guy… Even his cousin was such a disappointment.

"There is another and more brutal way of saying the same thing. In fact there are hundreds of ways: he could spend the rest of his life listing them. But the most brutal way is to say that he is afraid: afraid of writing, afraid of women. He may pull faces at the poems he reads in Ambit and Agenda, but at least they are there, in print, in the world. How is he to know that the men who wrote them did not spend years squirming as fastidiously as he in front of the blank page? They squirmed, but then finally they pulled themselves together and wrote as best they could what had to be written, and mailed it out, and suffered the humiliation of rejection or the equal humiliation of seeing their effusions in cold print, in all their poverty. In the same way these men would have found an excuse, however lame, for speaking to some or other beautiful girl in the Underground, and if she turned her head away or passed a scornful remark in Italian to a friend, well, they would have found a way of suffering the rebuff in silence and the next day would have tried again with another girl. That is how it is done, that how the world works. And one day they, these men, these poets, these lovers, would be lucky: the girl, no matter how exaltedly beautiful, would speak back, and one thing would lead to another and their lives would be transformed, both their lives, and that would be that. 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. He wants an A or an alpha or one hundred per cent for his every attempt, and a big Excellent! in the margin. Ludicrous! Childish! He does not have to be told so: he can see it for himself. Nevertheless. Nevertheless he cannot do it. Not today. Perhaps tomorrow. Perhaps tomorrow he will be in the mood, have the courage."

Coetzee को तब उठाया जब रात में नींद आंखों से कोसों दूर थी। बहुत से दरवाजों को खोलने के बाद इन तक पहुंचा था। कुछ नया पढ़ना था। और शुरू के 3 पेज में ही लगा कि शुरू से यही चाहिए था। इतना हल्कापन की लगा ठीक दुपहरी में ठंडी हवा के झोंके मिल रहे हों।

Coetzee उन सारी बातों से उलझते हैं जो 19 की उम्र में मेरे सामने थी। अकेलापन, सपने, घर का सपना, प्रेम, संबंध और लेखन। फिर कुछ देर में लगा कि नहीं सब कुछ एक अजीब सा भारीपन लिए हुए है। मैं थकने लगा। बीच में ये भी हुआ कि किताब रखनी पड़ी। पर फिर। फिर से हल्की हवा चली और कहानी अपने सही रफ्तार से चलने लगी।

अंत आते आते लगा कि इस किताब की बहुत जरूरत थी। सुंदर कहानी। Coetzee बहुत हल्के से अपनी बात रखते हैं। इतना धीमे से जैसे कि बहुत अपना अपने निजी संवाद हमारे कान में फुसफुसा रहा हो।

Esperabame inmoralidade, pero non a este nivel. En especial a relación do protagonista coas mulleres é terrible. De todas formas, en parte ese é o interés deste protagonista: partimos dunha moralidad gris que axiña pasa a un zigzag de extremos donde hai de todo menos gris, tan pronto se volve unha maldad enorme como unha pureza inesperada. É un personaxe muy de extremos e aínda así non parece incoherente en ningún momento. Nin que decir ten o reprobable que é moralmente, pero resúltame fascinante como personaxe, e sobre todo fascíname como o escritor logra darlle esa sensación de realismo, de que queiras seguir lendo e entendo ao protagonista a pesar de todo, a pesar de que podes estar lendo como almorza e de súpeto pense algo horripilante.

Adoro a evolución que fai o protagonista da súa visión de Inglaterra. Adoro como se sinte afogado por un sistema capitalista hiperprodutivo intentando ser artista. E adoro o tratamento frío, obxectivo e ao mesmo tempo desgarrador que se fai da Guerra Fría e o da racismo en Sudáfrica.

Hai mil partes deste libro que podría citar e non serían suficientes, pero quédome con esta:
«Ganapathy y él son dos caras de la misma moneda: Ganapathy no se muere de hambre porque haya cortado los lazos con la madre India, sino porque no come lo suficiente, porque pese a su master en ciencia computacional no sabe nada de vitaminas, minerales y aminoácidos; y él está atrapado en un final extenuante, empujándose con cada movimiento un poco más hacia el rincón, hacia la derrota. Un día de estos los hombres de la ambulancia llamarán al piso de Ganapathy y lo sacarán en un camilla con la cara cubierta por una sábana.
Cuando hayan acabado con Ganapathy podrían pasar a buscarle a él».

3,5

Después de leer "Infancia" y haber descubierto el talento de Coetzee, pensé que sería una gran idea traerlo conmigo a China (por ahora mi nuevo hogar) puesto que lo que aquí se desentraña es precisamente la búsqueda de sentido, similar a la que emprendí yo mismo con este viaje. La lectura es fácil y bastante fluida; sin embargo, siento que aquellos elementos tan atractivos del primer volúmen de esta, en parte, autobiografía, no estuvieron presentes y por ello al culminar, no sabes muy bien cómo sentirte al respecto.
De cualquier manera, la obra vale la pena y muchas de las reflexiones del autor de seguro quedarán en la memoria de los lectores.

This second instalment in Coetzees autobiography tells of a young man making his way to London as a novice computer programmer. The moments of extreme loneliness, uncertainty and poor spirit experienced made me reminisce a lot about my own sojourning in Europe a few years ago. The book provides some interesting reflections on apartheid in South Africa from a foreigners perspective.

I am amazed at the ease of Coetzees prose. The honesty and clarity of his writing combined with a strong South African flavour has you turning page after page wanting more. Coetzee seems to have been strongly influenced by the writings of Ezra Pound, most notably The Cantos. Names and insights of other grand masters are strewn over the pages...Baudelaire, Rilke, Rimbaud, etc. Two lines from the book I really enjoyed:
- He is ready for romance, ready even for tragedy, ready for anything, in fact, so long as he will be consumed by it and remade.
- He knows how easy it is to be bad, how one has only to relax for the badness to emerge.

Overall - amazing insights from the mind of this South African Nobel Laureate.