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John Maxwell Coetzee - Youth
'Youth' seems to serve as Coetzee's semi-fictional autobiography - a portrait of the artist as
a young man and a description of the fearful South Africa he grew up in. The protagonist, John,
is an unsympathetic, insecure young man studying mathematics in Cape Town and the narrator is
more concerned with his feelings and thoughts than with his actions.
With ambitions of becoming an artist - a poet - the protagonist leaves South Africa for London
where he hopes to find passion and inspiration for his authorship. Instead of a writer, however,
he becomes a computer programmer (initially) for the IBM and finds his days dull and uninspiring.
His personal life is boring as well as he tries his luck with a wide array of girls and find none
of them to be satisfactory: he has not yet understood the role women should play in his identity
as an artist.
The novel is personal and, at times, quite an uncomfortable read. During those few years that the
novel spans John comes nothing nearer to solving the existential crisis he fidns himself in. His
depression is steadily increasing - so is the absurdity of his arguents and he even doubts his own
sexuality at times. He is, however, sure that he possesses a sexuality, a "sacred fire" - at least
to the extent that he is sure that he is an artist - and this fire, this passion, must be sensed by
some women.
As John is taking a distance from his life as a computer programmer, spending his spare time
reading poetry and fiction, working on a scholarly thesis on Ford Madox Ford and, later, reading
about chess, the narrator, too, is distanced from the action and the characters in a third
person point of view dubbed by Coetzee himself as 'autrebiography'. This autrebiography does not
make the writing impersonal. On the contrary, it underlines John's insecurity and his lack of a
complete and fulfilling identity: it illustrates John's confusion. Is he a passionate artist or a
dull computer programmer? Is he an European subject? A British subject? Or, as he continously
seems to deny, a South African subject? Is he a colonized or a colonizer? (And, for Coetzee's part
- has this changed after the abolishemnt of apartheid?)
'Youth' is a book quite unlike any other I have read because it is about identity and nothing else:
the only truly significant event of the book was John leaving South Africa - a topic that is never
touched upon: for the duration of the first fourty pages, he is in Cape Town and, suddenly, we find
him in London. The conflicts are not between people in the traditional sense, but rather between
identities. The conflict is not solved - in a sense, the story does not end - and so, citing
New York Times'
rewiew, "as the story Coetzee chooses to tell about his youth, this is an awfully strange one,
beginning too late to show us why he wanted to become a writer, ending too early to show us how he
eventually became one."
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'Youth' seems to serve as Coetzee's semi-fictional autobiography - a portrait of the artist as
a young man and a description of the fearful South Africa he grew up in. The protagonist, John,
is an unsympathetic, insecure young man studying mathematics in Cape Town and the narrator is
more concerned with his feelings and thoughts than with his actions.
With ambitions of becoming an artist - a poet - the protagonist leaves South Africa for London
where he hopes to find passion and inspiration for his authorship. Instead of a writer, however,
he becomes a computer programmer (initially) for the IBM and finds his days dull and uninspiring.
His personal life is boring as well as he tries his luck with a wide array of girls and find none
of them to be satisfactory: he has not yet understood the role women should play in his identity
as an artist.
The novel is personal and, at times, quite an uncomfortable read. During those few years that the
novel spans John comes nothing nearer to solving the existential crisis he fidns himself in. His
depression is steadily increasing - so is the absurdity of his arguents and he even doubts his own
sexuality at times. He is, however, sure that he possesses a sexuality, a "sacred fire" - at least
to the extent that he is sure that he is an artist - and this fire, this passion, must be sensed by
some women.
As John is taking a distance from his life as a computer programmer, spending his spare time
reading poetry and fiction, working on a scholarly thesis on Ford Madox Ford and, later, reading
about chess, the narrator, too, is distanced from the action and the characters in a third
person point of view dubbed by Coetzee himself as 'autrebiography'. This autrebiography does not
make the writing impersonal. On the contrary, it underlines John's insecurity and his lack of a
complete and fulfilling identity: it illustrates John's confusion. Is he a passionate artist or a
dull computer programmer? Is he an European subject? A British subject? Or, as he continously
seems to deny, a South African subject? Is he a colonized or a colonizer? (And, for Coetzee's part
- has this changed after the abolishemnt of apartheid?)
'Youth' is a book quite unlike any other I have read because it is about identity and nothing else:
the only truly significant event of the book was John leaving South Africa - a topic that is never
touched upon: for the duration of the first fourty pages, he is in Cape Town and, suddenly, we find
him in London. The conflicts are not between people in the traditional sense, but rather between
identities. The conflict is not solved - in a sense, the story does not end - and so, citing
