Boyhood: Scenes from Provincial Life

Coetzee's real achievement here is to stick so close to a boy's consciousness that it hurts: the wisdom coupled with the lack of context for it, the physicality of feeling, the impossibility of articulation. Eschewing plot and character for an anecdotal narrative, Coetzee captures a boy's sense of reality, a reality that can't be easily transformed into narrative. A work of tremendous integrity and pain.

Touching, illuminative, and compulsively readable, the first volume of South African writer J.M. Coetzee's "autobiography" is a wonderful introduction to the writer if you aren't familiar with him (as I wasn't). His prose style is spare but descriptive, and conveys South Africa in the late '40s and early '50s as seen through the eyes of a child. Not big on "plot," but based more upon observation, Boyhood is a quiet triumph.

Having grown up in Cape Town in the 1960's at a time before apartheid was rigorously enforced, JM Coetzee's account of his boyhood, while on the surface austere and aparently joyless, was pure pleasure for me to read. I revelled in the absolute accuracy of his descriptions and the ruthless, heartless honesty of a child who must function in a world that is often alien and confusing. It brought back numerous incidents of my own childhood - the stuff that nowadays is unacceptable to disclose. Along with Tobias Wolf's This Boys Life and Truffaut's The 400 Blows, Boyhood is a wonderfully honest record of childhood.

Not quite a memoir, not quite fiction, Boyhood is elegant and powerful in the way of J.M. Coetzee's novels, only more so. A white boy growing up in post-WW2 South Africa may not appear an awfully exciting proposition. But this is not quite a book on South Africa, either. Its images will disturb you, lead you astray: at times Boyhood reads like a darkly intriguing fairy-tale. The detached third-person narrative has surprising effects: the story becomes more moving, the thinking more probing. Perhaps the truly African ingredient here is the passion beneath the simple sentences on common enough childhood experiences. A rare book that will tug at your heart, despite the author's reputation for "austerity" and "intellectually forbidding" writing.

I read "Boyhood" immediately after reading "Angela's Ashes." The similarities are startling: children subjected to the superstition and reticence of adults, the misinformation passed off as wisdom by other children, the demands of a culture that come across as inexplicable imperatives, the power as well as the ineffectiveness of adults, the complicated relationship between sons and mothers. The boy, John, is bright enough to see for himself the harshness of the culture, the indifference of the adults around him to the beauty of children, the arbitrariness and the hypocrisy of adults. What he doesn't see is that although he considers himself an outsider, he has internalized some of these same characteristics himself at an early age. I found the book moving and disturbing. It evoked many memories of my own childhood -- the confusion, the necessary lies, the feeling of being different and not acceptable to other children, the expectations of caste, the strangeness of adult behavior. It also helped me recall the joy of learning, of physical activity, of creation, of playing with language. Coetzee is able to create literature out of the confusion of his experience. One hopes that in the process he has managed to avoid the brutality that he observed in the children he grew up with.