Product Description

"Youth's" narrator, a student in 1950s South Africa, has long been plotting an escape from his native country. Studying mathematics, reading poetry, saving money, he tries to ensure that when he arrives in the real world, he will be prepared to experience life to its full intensity, and transform it into art. Arriving at last in London, however, he finds neither poetry nor romance. Instead, he succumbs to the monotony of life as a computer programmers, from which random, loveless affaires offer no relief. Devoid of inspiration, he stops writing and begins a dark pilgrimage in which he is continually tested and continually found wanting.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #8594 in Books
• Published on: 2003-02-06
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 256 pages

About the Author
J.M. Coetzee's work includes Dusklands, In the Heart of the Country, which won the premier South African literary award, the CNA Prize, Waiting for the Barbarians, which was awarded the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize, the James Tait Black Memorial Prize and the CNA Prize, Life and Times of Michael K, which won the Booker Prize and the Prix Etranger Femina, Foe, Age of Iron, which won the Sunday Express Book of the Year Award, The Master of Petersburg, which won the Irish Times International Fiction Award and the memoir Boyhood: Scenes from Provincial Life. His most recent novel, Disgrace, won the Booker Prize, making the first author to have won it twice.

Excerpted from Youth by J.M. Coetzee. Copyright © 2002. Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
He lives in a one-room flat near Mowbray railway station, for which he pays eleven guineas a month. On the last working day of each month he catches the train in to the city, to Loop Street, where A. & B. Levy, property agents, have their brass plate and tiny office. To Mr B. Levy, younger of the Levy brothers, he hands the envelope with the rent. Mr Levy pours the money out onto his cluttered desk and counts it. Grunting and sweating, he writes a receipt. 'Voilà, young man!' he says, and passes it over with a flourish.
He is at pains not to be late with the rent because he is in the flat under false pretences. When he signed the lease and paid A. & B. Levy the deposit, he gave his occupation not as 'Student' but as 'Library Assistant,' with the university library as his work address.
It is not a lie, not entirely. From Monday to Friday it is his job to man the reading room during evening hours. It is a job that the regular librarians, women for the most part, prefer not to do because the campus, up on the mountainside, is too bleak and lonely at night. Even he feels a chill down his spine as he unlocks the back door and gropes his way down a pitch-dark corridor to the mains switch. It would be all too easy for some evildoer to hide in the stacks when the staff go home at five o'clock, then rifle the empty offices and wait in the dark to waylay him, the night assistant, for his keys.
Few students make use of the evening opening; few are even aware of it. There is little for him to do. The ten shillings per evening he earns is easy money.
Sometimes he imagines a beautiful girl in a white dress wandering into the reading room and lingering distractedly after closing time; he imagines showing her over the mysteries of the bindery and cataloguing room, then emerging with her into the starry night. It never happens.
Working in the library is not his only employment. On Wednesday afternoons he assists with first-year tutorials in the Mathematics Department (three pounds a week); on Fridays he conducts the diploma students in drama through selected comedies of Shakespeare (two pounds ten); and in the late afternoons he is employed by a cram school in Rondebosch to coach dummies for their Matriculation exams (three shillings an hour). During vacations he works for the Municipality (Division of Public Housing) extracting statistical data from household surveys. All in all, when he adds up the monies, he is comfortably off - comfortably enough to pay his rent and university fees and keep body and soul together and even save a little. He may only be nineteen but he is on his own feet, dependent on no one.
The needs of the body he treats as a matter of simple common sense. Every Sunday he boils up marrowbones and beans and celery to make a big pot of soup, enough to last the week. On Fridays he visits Salt River market for a box of apples or guavas or whatever fruit is in season. Every morning the milkman leaves a pint of milk on his doorstep. When he has a surplus of milk he hangs it over the sink in an old nylon stocking and turns it into cheese. For the rest he buys bread at the corner shop. It is a diet Rousseau would approve of, or Plato. As for clothes, he has a good jacket and trousers to wear to lectures. Otherwise he makes old clothes last.
He is proving something: that each man is an island; that you don't need parents.
Some evenings, trudging along the Main Road in raincoat and shorts and sandals, his hair plastered flat by the rain, lit up by the headlights of passing cars, he has a sense of how odd he looks. Not eccentric (there is some distinction in looking eccentric), just odd. He grinds his teeth in chagrin and walks faster.
He is slim and looselimbed, yet at the same time flabby. He would like to be attractive but he knows he is not. There is something essential he lacks, some definition of feature. Something of the baby still lingers in him. How long before he will cease to be a baby? What will cure him of babyhood, make him into a man?
What will cure him, if it were to arrive, will be love. He may not believe in God but he does believe in love and the powers of love. The beloved, the destined one, will see at once through the odd and even dull exterior he presents to the fire that burns within him. Meanwhile, being dull and odd-looking are part of a purgatory he must pass through in order to emerge, one day, into the light: the light of love, the light of art. For he will be an artist, that has long been settled. If for the time being he must be obscure and ridiculous, that is because it is the lot of the artist to suffer obscurity and ridicule until the day when he is revealed in his true powers and the scoffers and mockers fall silent.
His sandals cost two shillings and sixpence a pair. They are of rubber, and are made somewhere in Africa, Nyasaland perhaps. When they get wet they do not grip the sole of the foot. In the Cape winter it rains for weeks on end. Walking along the Main Road in the rain, he sometimes has to stop to recapture a sandal that has slipped free. At such moments he can see the fat burghers of Cape Town chuckling as they pass in the comfort of their cars. Laugh! he thinks. Soon I will be gone!

Customer Reviews

A Deep and Thoughtful Book
I'm a Bracknell-based African computer programmer who once had aspirations of being a writer. So reading a book about a Bracknell-based African computer programmer who once had aspirations of being a writer was either going to leave me breathless or livid.

Youth is not a book in which very much happens - and that's because it's a book about real life. The real life of a young man finding his feet in an alien country. But the beauty of Youth is not something as mundane as excitement (any book can give you that), it's the truthfulness of the book (I should know: see paragraph 1). It is the most well-realised book I've read in ages, and in its nuances it contains more feeling than library-fuls of other books.

I guess what I'm saying is that you'll either love it - or be bored silly by it. I loved it. Which is fortunate since it seems so much to be the story of my life.

My favourite Coetzee book
I am surprised by the ambivalent reviews of this book. I have read several of JM Coetzees books and this is my favourite. Coetzee is a very intelligent and penetrating writer - perhaps this is why his writing has been characterised here as detached. In my opinion, this feature is a virtue. Along with his spare, almost poetic style, this is what makes his books so utterly exhilarating.

'Youth' gets to the heart of the confusion facing a young man torn between worldly constraint and artistic ambition. The everyday dilemmas and insecurities he faces occupy his time more and more as he searches for some kind of grander purpose or secret of artistic success. This is a book that will hypnotize those who have ever found themselves questioning their own life-choices. As the protagonist feels his destiny slowly escaping him, we are left, not with feelings of hopelessness, but with a profound and motivating lesson about the futility of neuroticism and inaction. A wonderful book.

Wonderful
For someone like myself who is interested in writing and in mathematics, I loved this book and didn't want it to end. Coetzee is too cold-hearted to fall in love, too idiosyncratic to make friends and too anal to begin writing so ends up in computers instead. His internal battles rage on. Wonderful stuff. By the way, were the shops really closed on Saturday afternoons in Bracknell in 1963?