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Overview
Coetzee grew up in a new development north of Cape Town, tormented by guilt and fear. With a father he despised, and a mother he both adored and resented, he led a double life—the brilliant and well-behaved student at school, the princely despot at home, always terrified of losing his mother's love. His first encounters with literature, the awakenings of sexual desire, and a growing awareness of apartheid left him with baffling questions; and only in his love of the high veld ("farms are places of freedom, of life") could he find a sense of belonging. Bold and telling, this masterly evocation of a young boy's life is the book Coetzee's many admirers have been waiting for, but never could have expected.
Synopsis
Coetzee has been reluctant to talk about himself. Now, revisiting the South Africa of a half century ago, he writes about his childhood and his own interior life. Boyhood's young narrator grew up in a new development north of Cape Town, tormented by guilt and fear. With a father he did not respect, and a mother he both adored and resented, he led a double life -- at school the brilliant and well-behaved student, at home the princely despot, always terrified of losing his mother's love. His first encounters with literature, the awakenings of sexual desire, and a growing awareness of apartheid left him with baffling questions; and only in his love of the veld ('farms are places of freedom, of life') could he find a sense of belonging. Bold and telling, this masterly evocation of a young boy's life is the book Coetzee's many admirers have been waiting for, but never could have expected.
NY Times Sunday Book Review
Boyhood is not exactly a paean to literature and the life of the mind. The young Coetzee views his own imagination not merely as an escape from provincial tedium or a looming promise for the future....Written in a third-person, present-tense voice that effaces adult perspective and lends harsh immediacy to the inner agonies of the child, the memoir explores a profound ambivalence about what in most respects looks like a routine middle-class boyhood. -- Rand Richards Cooper
Editorials
The New York Times
Fiercely revealing, bluntly unsentimental. . .a telling portrait of the artist as a young man. — Michiko KakutaniNY Times Sunday Book Review
Boyhood is not exactly a paean to literature and the life of the mind. The young Coetzee views his own imagination not merely as an escape from provincial tedium or a looming promise for the future....Written in a third-person, present-tense voice that effaces adult perspective and lends harsh immediacy to the inner agonies of the child, the memoir explores a profound ambivalence about what in most respects looks like a routine middle-class boyhood. -- Rand Richards CooperPublishers Weekly
'He thinks of Afrikaners as people in a rage all the time because their hearts are hurt. He thinks of the English as people who have not fallen into a rage because they live behind walls and guard their hearts well.' The 'he' in this bitter, brooding childhood memoir is Booker Prize winner Coetzee himself (Waiting for the Barbarians), who uses his early recollections to probe the hidden anxieties of middle-class white South Africa after WWII. The memoir begins in elementary school, when Coetzee's Anglophile Afrikaner family leaves Cape Town after the latest professional failure of the author's father. An attorney and the poor relation of respectable farmers, the alcoholic elder Coetzee takes a humiliating accounting job in the small town of Worcester, where young Coetzee begins to learn the cruel distinctions of class, ethnicity and race that govern his parents' lives and learns, at the same time, to despise his father and fear his mother, a frustrated, resentful schoolteacher, feelings that the memoirist reproduces unsoftened by the intervening decades. What is most impressive, and oppressive, about this portrait of the artist as a young man is Coetzee's refusal to forgive his parents for their prejudices, their pettiness, their hatred of each other. If there is a culprit outside the family circle, it is a colonial shame and unease as described by Coetzee: the delicate web of class pretensions that overlay and hid from white view the brute fact of apartheid.Library Journal
In this slim, interesting volume, Coetzee, a South African writer distinguished both as a novelist (Master of St. Petersburg) and an essayist (Giving Offense: Essays on Censorship), reflects about who he is and why he writes as he does. Using third-person narration, these 'scenes' read more like a novella than a true autobiography. Coetzee develops his character, a young boy on the verge of adolescence, through a richly detailed interior monolog. Trying to make sense of his place in his family, his parents' unhappy marriage, his conflicting needs for nurturance and independence from his mother, and his complicated feelings about the racially segregated society in which he lives, Coetzee struggles with basic questions of identity and purpose. The honest intensity he uses to examine his thoughts and actions leads to a foundation of self-understanding and confidence from which the writer was formed. Well recommended for writing programs and collections in general and multicultural literature. -- Denise S. Sticha, Seton Hill College Library, Greenburg, PennsylvaniaRose Miller has it all: wealthy husband, gorgeous little girl, lavish house, great success as a novelistand a stalker who knows about her shady past.