Boyhood: Scenes from Provincial Life

Rating:
Summary: Moments
Review: A fairly intriguing portrayal of one's boyhood - though in a subdued manner. Hard, clean, unsentimental narration with great psychological insights - just what you'd expect from a good writer as Coetzee. The portrayl of the mother-son relationship is pretty deep, of his complicated feelings towards her: a mixture of reliance and contempt, of love and fear, with an undertone of sympathy and admiration from the grown up narrator. Scenes of Coetzee among others - classmates, relatives, etc. are discontinuous, fragmented memories, depicting the formation of self. One has to understand some of these in relation to the African society at that time though, so a little background information will help.
I wouldnt think of this book as a classic, but it does have one of the most profound moments in contemporary memoirs. There's this moment when Coetzee recalls his first childhood memory: of him sitting next to his mother on the bus, and him letting something go in the wind. I wont go into details - I'd only say that moment is everything: memories, love, understanding; the beginning of self-awarenes, of one's relation to things, to the outside world; of the sadness and happiness deep inside that one cannot describe.

Rating:
Summary: Deceptively simple
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: growing up
Review: Gowing up, in every known culture, has always been a painful experience. Often happy one, but sometimes not so happy. Many times charming, and many times heavy with burden you bacome aware only later in your life. Coetzee has stared with his own growing in backwater town near Johannesburg, picturing the life as it has been in the days when he could be called young lad. Showing his affection towards his mother which always seemed to him more 'paternal' than she should have been, Coetzee paints a portrait of an ordinary child in not so ordinary sourroundings.
Qouestion is, can that be called literature. Of course it can, but it is somethig more than pure literature... it is life itself, pusling growing, crying, evolving... With every step of kiddie John you'll be aware of 'dangers' that lay ahead of him, for every wrong move he takes you'll feel sympathy... and besides other, that kind of thing composes the great literature

Rating:
Summary: An unsentimental childhood
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: Coetzee's Childhood Story
Review: Here we finally have the privilige of reading a little about Coetzee's past and some of the experiences that have shaped him into the author he is today. As a young boy in Cape Town, he is an exemplary student scoring at the top of his class for most everything except for English (surprisingly enough). On the homefront, however, he is a completely different boy. His father is an uninvolved father to say the least. His mother tries to make up for his father by being a wonderful support and help. Too often, though, she is choking with her affection and Coetzee vacillates between intense love and dislike for her. He also appears to be a fearful and dramatic child. He is afraid someone will find out he is not a "real" Catholic, that he'll be terribly embarassed in front of all his friends and not know what to do, that the double life he leads at home and at school will be detected, etc., etc. He is bound by these fears in that instead of believing that if any one of these things actually did happen, life would certainly go on as it did before, he feels as if he would surely die. Granted, he probably means this in the figurative sense, yet it reveals extreme dramatical tendencies for a boy his age. This inclination may have been the root to the imagination that has matured into the creative and intuitive authorship Coetzee has come to be known for today. A little slow-going in the beginning, Boyhood picks up nicely after 100 pages and finishes off just as well.

Rating:
Summary: ok.
Review: okay. has historical relevance as a memoir of an Afrikaaner boy growing up in S. Africa.

Rating:
Summary: BITTEREST ADOLESCENCE
Review: So far I have preferred this brief novel over all the other Coetzee works I have read. It is not the most acclaimed novel, but somehow it is the most personal and accessible of his works. The others are challenging, yes, and subtle. Boyhood, though, is something deeply felt, still subtle, but very much something powerful and something people can relate to when they read it.
The autobiographical story focuses on the narrator, a boy who has moved to a housing estate with his family-to a place with streets named after trees although there are no trees. A place with servant's rooms and no servants. The family is nothing like most of the other families around or indeed in much of South Africa. He lives in a strange world where children are not beaten, adults are called by their first names, they do not attend church, they are not Afrikaners... and in school when he is asked to declare a religion, he does not even understand the significance of declaring himself Catholic because he did not know what else to say. His upbringing is unusual and unnatural, in his opinion, because it involved no beatings. His father was an alcoholic and might have beaten him if the mother had not been so severely overprotective and against beatings. The narrator believes that if only once he were to be beaten he would suddenly be turned into a "normal" boy. There are frequent school beatings, but he does everything humanly possible to avoid those beatings because he knows he would never be able to bear the embarrassment of his reaction to being beat in school.
At the centre of the boy's world is his mother whom he loves and reveres at the same time as being repelled by her very nature. She loves him in an overbearing and overprotective way; she changes her mind and mood often and contradicts herself constantly-he feels his life and world is crumbling around him with her fickle contradictions. He thoroughly belonged to her.
He hates formulas, small talk and "being normal" or dull. His mother's family accepts his eccentricities; his father and his family do not. While he is deeply in love with the farm on his father's side of the family, he rarely gets to go there because he is an unwelcome guest. He feels free there, like he belongs to the farm. "He has two mothers. Twice-born: born from a woman and born from the farm. Two mothers and no father."
Mostly his entire adolescence is pervaded by uptight guilt and worry. Everything is his fault. When he begins to realise his sexual awakening, he ponders, "That is how the questioning always works. At first it may wander here and there; but in the end, unfailingly, it turns and gathers itself and points a finger at himself. Always it is he who sets the train of thinking in motion; always it is the thinking that slips out of his control and returns to accuse him. Beauty is innocence; innocence is ignorance; ignorance is ignorance of pleasure; pleasure is guilty; he is guilty."
Through the eyes of the adolescent narrator the book offers so many glimpses into routine, daily life and common ideas, stereotypes, and matter of fact questioning of life through the naïve eyes of a boy. He reveals his embarrassment about the conventions of how Coloureds and whites are supposed to interact. He has a great deal of curiosity about the lives of the Coloureds and how they live. He reveals a deep hatred for Afrikaners and their inner rage. He worries that he will be moved to an Afrikaner class rather than an English one because he has an Afrikaner name. He excels in English and is deeply proud of his distance from the Afrikaner way of life, something in which he will never be "fluent". He has a strange reverence for England and all things English. He hears rumours that, although the Boer War is not on the official school syllabus, that Afrikaner classes are taught lessons about it as the "2nd War of Liberation". He feels guilt when he wastes food. (He and his younger brother take eggs that have been delivered to their house and throw them at another house. "Perhaps elsewhere in the world one can throw eggs; but in this country there are judges who will judge by standards of righteousness. In this country one cannot be thoughtless about food.")
When he seems to be settled into a certain routine, the family moves to Cape Town because his father is going to resume the practise of law. Unfortunately the practise is short-lived because the father drinks too much and in his need for "approval" unwisely lends money that isn't his to lend. The family is financially destroyed. And while the boy once loved school, he has grown to feel only passionate rage and nervousness all the time. Cape Town is making him grow stupid and provides no challenges. The bitterness of awkward adolescence dawns: he does not like himself and constantly feels embarrassed. Something to which we can all relate.
"'Wait until you have children of you own,' she says to him in one of her bitterer moods. `Then you will know.' What will he know? It is a formula she uses, a formula that sounds as if it comes from the old days. Perhaps it is what each generation says to the next, as a warning, as a threat. But he does not want to hear it. `Wait until you have children.' What nonsense, what a contradiction! How can a child have children? Anyway, what he would know if he were a father, if he were his own father, is precisely what he does not want to know. He will not accept the vision that she wants to force upon him: sober, disappointed, disillusioned."
As with most Coetzee novels there is no great "ending". It just ends. It feels better that way. The book simply speaks for itself which its eloquence and elegance, even in conveying the awkward and gangly phases of a young boy's life.

Rating:
Summary: Double, double toil and trouble
Review: This is the type of book you would expect from someone as accomplished as Coetzee. It's a simple story, with complex themes. It is a nostalgic introspective epic, seen through the eyes of a ten year old boy. It asks you (the reader) to judge the young protagonist, without giving you any help. The reader must keep in mind that this boy is going to be someone special later on in life, so, do you allow him the freedom to invent himself, or do you condemn him for the sins he confesses to? One could easily write a whole essay on this book, this is not the place. If you like being challenged, then this is a good read.
Finally, I grew up in the same area and under similar circumstances, it brought back many a memory.

Rating:
Summary: Spare, but wonderfully insightful
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: Spare, but wonderfully insightful
Review: 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.