Summary
A memoir of growing up in South Africa during the 1940s and 1950s, written by the Nobel Prize-winning author of THE LIFE AND TIMES OF MICHAEL K. and DISGRACE. Coetzee examines his early impressions of his family, his unhappy years at school, and his slowly developing awareness of the political strife that hangs over his country.
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Media Reviews
"A short and unsettling, deftly realized memoir....This is not an eventful memoir-its strength comes, instead, from Coetzee's nuanced, unblinking perceptions. His childhood was not unhappy in the conventional sense; the sadness and tragedies were mainly of the ordinary kind, and in his masterful depiction of them, that's what makes them so shattering....[A] powerful, disillusioned portrait of childhood..."
-- Kirkus
"It will not surprise readers of Coetzee's fiction to learn that the story of 'Boyhood' is primarily internal, the story of an exquisitely painful-almost autistic-self-consciousness....Coetzee is compelled to write his way out of his own South African prison; we benefit from his struggles."
-- Salon
"Coetzee's strange, hard, impacted intelligence is one of the most powerful in contemporary literature." -- James Wood
-- Guardian (London)
"Mr. Coetzee writes, as always, with striking elegance, but it is not clear whether these 'Scenes From Provincial Life' are to be taken as factual memories or fictional projections." -- Phoebe-Lou Adams
-- Atlantic Monthly
"'Boyhood' is a charmingly accessible book. It is the memoir of a sensitive soul, absorbing the elemental impulses of life for later use....At first it strikes one as rather odd for a memoir to be written in the third person, as Coetzee's is. But this has the effect of broadening his emotional and imaginative range within the constraints of a memoir." -- Mark Mathabane
-- Washington Post Book World
"John Coetzee has written a spare and sober little tale of growing up in a hard place....This is a book about how a writer makes stories: out of bits and pieces and a long memory. In South Africa, memory remains a weapon, and a threat. People don't like the ghosts of themselves; amnesia is all the rage. But as the young narrator realises: if he doesn't remember-who will? Coetzee's 'Boyhood' is an uncannily accurate picture of the way things were in South Africa." -- Christopher Hope
-- Literary Review
"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....What to say about all of this, other than that Coetzee is not merely a born writer, but one born for South Africa?" -- Rand Richards Cooper
-- New York Times Book Review
Bibliographic Details
Publisher: Penguin Group USA
Published date: 1997
Size: 6.25 x 9.25 inches
Weight: 0.75 pounds
Pages: 166
Publisher's Notes
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.
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