Resumo de Youth - J.M.Coetzee

This novel had been written by the celebrated Nobel laureate in 2002 and had seen the light of day in 2003. The novel actually pivots round a youth of South Africa in the mid-sixties, who circumambulates the continent in the hope of making his dream of being a successful poet in future come true. He struggles against all odds in order to emerge successful .He gets into a University in US to study Maths and write a thesis on Ford Maddox Ford later on. At one point of time, he lands up a job with the reputed concern IBM but after a few months he gives it up on the excuse of feeling lonely and friendless. He projects himself as a butt of ridicule, thus being off his guard. John, the protagonist, writes to his mother in South Africa that he is not interested to go back to his hometown anymore. He moves o London, and after relinquishing the job at IBM he shifts accommodation and falls an easy victim to frustration. When even his research on Ford Maddox Ford stands at crossroads and he thinks of taking up a new job, he grows a fad of changing girl-friends at his own sweet will, quite objectionably and indiscriminately. He, unscrupulously, has sexual intercourse with Marianne ,a virgin friend of his cousin Ilse. A struggling poet has every right to do so as the artist and the prostitute are usually in proximity: reasons the budding researcher-cum-poet. But his cousin Ilse later sarcastically comments, ?I hope you don?t treat all your girls like that ,even in London. Marianne is a special person, she doesn?t deserve that kind of treatment.? The computer programmer-cum-aspiring poet ,John, reasons straightway to exonerate himself,? Even in London. What does she mean?................But he doesn?t really believe that the fault is London?s. He has read Henry James. He knows how easy it is to be bad, how one has only to relax for the badness to emerge.? Such is the mindset of John of modern era that he does not hesitate to outrage the virginity of a girl he is unfamiliar with and reasons later to free himself of any sense of guilt, if at all. John?s frantic quest for the Right Woman however ends in a fiasco He consoles himself, he is merely biding the time till the right woman steps into his life!! Even at some point in the novel, multicultural tensions abound in the novel: in the twenty-first century how can such strain be avoided especially when an Afrikaans-speaking South African youth moves to an alien land in search of job-placement! ?Apartheid? is a term , people from all walks of life are familiar with. That is why John stares hard at Ganapathy ,his colleague at International Computers suggests him to go for a scholarship in an American University. ?South Africa is a wound within him.? It bleeds, it smarts and he badly wants to get it healed . He wants to declare at the top of his voice that ?Once upon a time I used to live in South Africa but now I live in England.? He grows into a neurotic individual . In the concluding chapter of the novel ,we find the dreamer-writer revolting within him. Working on the Atlas model ,he rues to discover that his creativity has dried up absolutely. ?A year has passed since he last wrote a line of poetry.? Will he have to be miserable to write again? He sends a selection of lines plagiarized from Pablo Neruda to one of his friends at Cape Town and he publishes in a journal he himself edits. In Coetzee?s novel an element of Nadacreeps in. At eighteen John might be a poet. But he is now a computer-programmer in lieu of a poet or an artist or a writer for that matter! He and Ganapathy are just two sides of the same coin : Ganapathy is a self-styled person who chooses to eat less ,but he cannot eat as he is heading on to a defeat-, irreversible, irremediable! But why such deep-rooted sense of defeatism? Is it because it happens to be a common trait of the modern society?! Whatever it is, the novelist captivates the reading public with his narrative splendor, poetic prose, the deft art of placing a hapless,struggling soul in the vortex of a modern complicated societal structure. A must read for every bibliophile.

KET

Resumos Relacionados