Youth
(J.M. COETZEE)
The bestselling author J.M. Coetzee, born in Cape Town South africa in 1940, is one of the finest authors writing in the English language.
YOUTH set against the background of the 1960's, dealing with the spoilt hope of youth, is a remarkable portrait of conciousness turning on itself.
The book explorers a young man's struggle to find his way in the world as an artist.
The narrator, a university student, studying Mathematics and reading poetry; who left home to escape the oppressiveness of family; manages to pay his rent and university fees by holding down three jobs. He is determined to prove that each man is an island and doesn't need parents. Dull and odd-looking, he is prepared to forfeit all in his desire to become an artist.
To distance himself from his country's politics, he saves enough money to flee South Africa. Heading for London which he considers to be the art capital of the world, he rekons that there, in the real world, he will live life to its full. However he finds neither poetry or romance and succumbs to the monotomy of life as a computer programmer.
He becomes a lonely outsider in an alien world; with the knowledger that he cannot return; for whom loveless affairs offer no relief. Even the arrival, from South Africa, of a cousin and a brief fling with her friend fails to lift the gloom.
Eventually, devoid of inspiration, he stops writing and begins a dark pilgrimage in which he is continually tested and found wanting.
Sitting alone one Sunday afternoon he muses that at Eighteen he might have been a poet. Now he is not a poet, nor a writer, but a twenty-four-year-old computer programmer in a world where there are no thirty-year-old computer programmers.
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