I picked this book off the library shelf and read the blurb, and decided to read it because there seemed to be parallels with my own youth. What did I hope for? To make sense of my own youth? To make sense of things that happened to me?The protagonist in the book is a mathematics student at the University of Cape Town who wants to go to London to become a, writer, a poet. In the 1960s he goes, but having arrived in London he needs to get a job in order to live, and with his mathematical qualifications he manages to get one as a computer programmer with IBM. In his spare time he sits in the British Museum doing research for his writing, and later for a thesis for which he is offered a bursary.But gradually loneliness and mediocrity and boredom squeeze all the creativity out of him and he has less and less to say. And I could see parallels with my own life. Why should I write about my own life? It's not about me, it's about the book. But I picked up the book thinking it was about me, or that it might tell me something about me, so in a sense it is about me, and I compare myself with the protagonist in the book.I was a student at the University of Natal in Pietermaritzburg, and studied there from 1963 to 1965, majoring in Theology and Biblical Studies, with a minor in History. The Anglican bishop of Natal had found me a place for further study at St Chad's College, Durham, for the post-graduate Diploma in Theology. So, like the protagonist in Youth, I went to the UK in January 1966. The UK academic year only begins in September so I got a job driving buses in London to fill in the time, and I stayed in a lonely bed-sit, and for six months spent much of my spare time in my room in Streatham feeling alienated. Like the protagonist I felt a bit concerned about the Vietnam War. He wrote to the Chinese embassy and offered to go and teach English. I went to a couple of demos, one of them by accident. So much for the similarities, But there were also differences. The book tells nothing of the protagonist's journey, how he left, his first impressions on arriving, or anything like that. Just that he was glad to be in London, and glad to be out of the stifling restrictions of South Africa, and planned never to return. He went by sea, because he landed at Southampton. Though he seems to have been uninvolved in political activities in South Africa, he did not approve of the Nationalist government, I wondered how, having majored in Mathematics, he was allowed to enrol for postgraduate studies in English literature, with a thesis on Ford Madox Ford. In my experience South African universities don't work like that, but J.M. Coetzee was a professor of English literature at the University of Cape Town for several years, so perhaps he knows something that I don't. I was a bit more involved in political activities in my final year at university than the guy in the book, and in the middle of my final exams got an official warning under the Suppression of Communism Act that if I did not desist from activities that "further or are calculated to further any of the objects of communism" action would be taken against me. Most of my friends who had had such warnings got banning orders a few months later, so, in view of my plans to go and study in the UK I dropped my idea of a political holiday, and after my last exam went to Johannesburg and worked as a bus driver, saving money to pay for the boat fare overseas. Like the protagonist in the book, I wanted to go by sea. I drove buses and did as much overtime as I could to save money for the boat fare. Nevertheless, one afternoon as I was about to go to work I got a phone call from a Detective Sergeant van den Heever, of, as he said, the CID. He wanted to come and see me. I told him I was going to work, and would arrange to see him in the morning, after my overtime. I thought he could only want me for one (or both) of two things: to confiscate my passport or give me a banning order, either of which would scupper my plans for overseas study. After consultation with friends, I decided it would be best to be out of the country when Detective Sergent van den Heever wanted to see me the next morning, so I drove through the night to Bulawayo in UDI Rhodesia in my mother's car, with a friend who would bring the car back. We crossed the border at Beit Bridge when it opened at dawn, and by the time we got to Bulawayo there was a message from my mother to say she had booked me on a flight to London. So I boarded the plane late in the afternoon, and arrived in London the following day, feeling homesick, like an exile.Unlike the bloke in the book, my alienation set in right away. I hadn't expected culture shock, because after all they spoke English, there, didn't they? But it was all so sudden and so strange. I suspect many South Africans who left South Africa in a hurry in the 1960s had similar experiences to mine, but the book mentions nothing of that. One of the first things I had to do after arriving was to apply for an Aliens Registration Certificate. And when I got it, it said that I was not permitted to take employment, paid or unpaid, without the permission of the Minister of Labour. So how was I to survive for eight months until the university term began? The protagonist in the book faced nothing like that. So I began to ask how I could get that condition waived, so I could get a job. Well, they said, if you come to us showing you have a written job offer, you can apply for that to be altered. But no one was prepared to offer a job and then wait for the bureaucracy to grant permission. It was the classic Catch 22, just like black people in South Africa had to face under the pass laws, but there it was in their own country. I knew about the effexta of the pass laws from being told about it and from reading, but now I was experiencing it first hand. Useful experience if one wants to be a writer and write a book. That's what the protagonist in the book says too.After a number of unsuccessful attempts, I worked out how to play the system. I went to London Transport, applied for a job as a bus driver, noting that there was a labour exchange just across the road. Once I and the other applicants had been definitely offered the job, I asked the bloke at London Transport to sign the paper from the Ministry of Labour saying that employing me would not deprive a British citizen of a job. That was unlikely -- London Transport had more vacancies (about 7000) than the entire running staff employed by the Johannesburg Transport Department (about 1700). While the others all went off to tea I scuttled across the road to the labour exchange, showed them the paper with the job offer, and the application form from the Home Office for permission to take employment, and said "please sign there and put your stamp on it". The bloke behind the counter looked at me as if I was mad, but did what I asked, and I went back across the road and joined the others for tea. Having passed out as a driver (and yes, driving double-decker buses on the skid pan was great fun), I had to choose a garage. I said Peckham or Lewisham, which were the closest to some South African friends I might want to visit in my time off. But they said, no, it has to be where you live. I said I don't live anywhere. I'm staying with a bloke who put me up out of the kindness of his heart, but now wants me out of his guest room. But that didn't wash. Brixton was closest to his place so I must go thereI looked at the notices offering rooms to let. There was one with an Indian landlord. I went and knocked on the door. While I was waiting for someone to answer the door of the next door house opened (the houses were all built up close together -- I hadn't yet learned that they were called terraces), and an English woman asked what I wanted. I said they had advertised a room to let. She said, "They're Indians, you know. I wouldn't like you to stay there." I was gobsmacked (well, not really, "gobsmacked" only came into the language about 20 years later, but you know what I mean). I thought I'd left such racism behind in South Africa, and one of the cool things about being in Britain was that I could have an Indian landlord and the government wouldn't do a thing to stop me. I hadn't taken nosy neighbours into account. That one fell through, but the next one I tried advertised an African landlady. That felt like closer to home. She turned out to be from Sierra Leone, which is a long way from South Africa, but at least halfway home. She was Mrs Emily Williams, and her daughter Joyce was in her last year at high school and hoping to start at an English university at the same time as I was. The next door neighbours there were English too, but a lot more friendly. So the book was my story, but not my story. Perhaps another book needs to be written. Perhaps several other books need to be written.
Just reread it. The ending was pretty devastating. The whole book was really. I don't generally care for coming-of-age stories but Coetzee is such a fascinating individual to me (maybe because I'm a fellow uber-rational, emotional cripple)..."She writes every week but he does not write every week in return. That would be too much likereciprocation.""He has a horror of spilling mere emotion on to the page. Once it has begun to spill out he would not know how to stop it. It would be like severing an artery and watching one's lifeblood gush out.""They might as well get married, he and Astrid, then spend the rest of their lives looking after each other like invalids.""He is chagrined to see how well the reality principle operates, how, under the prod of loneliness, the boy with spots settles for the girl with the dull hair and the heavy legs, how everyone, no matter how unlikely, finds, in the end, a partner.""Without descending into the depths one cannot be an artist. But what exactly are the depths? He had thought that trudging down icy streets, his heart numb with loneliness, was the depths. But perhaps the real depths are different, and come in unexpected form: in a flare-up of nastiness against a girl in the early hours of the morning, for instance. Perhaps the depths that he has wanted to plumb have been within him all the time, closed up in his chest: depths of coldness, callousness, caddishness.""Sorry: the word comes heavily out of his mouth, like a stone. Does a single word of indeterminate class count as speech? Has what occurred between himself and the old man been an instance of human contact, or is it better described as mere social interaction, like the touching of feelers between ants? To the old man, certainly, it was nothing. All day long the old man stands there with his stacks of papers, muttering angrily to himself; he is always waiting for a chance to abuse some passer-by. Whereas in his own case the memory of that single words will persist for weeks, perhaps for the rest of his life. Bumping into people, saying “Sorry!”, getting abused: a ruse, a cheap way of forcing a conversation. How to trick loneliness.""What is wrong with him is that he is not prepared to fail."
What do You think about Youth (2003)?
These are pages from a journal; it could be yours or mine. No; this is a book about people who have willingly left their homes far, far behind to pursue a 'dream'. And then lose this dream to excuses. Excuses that justify their mundane lives in a city/country where they do not feel at home. No; this is a book about accepting that hope and life stem from failures. NO; this is from one writer in agony to another one. It is about a poet in the making. This book is a poetry. Haven't read something so bitter, so hurting and yet so darn satisfying in a long, long time! It shakes you inside out, forces you to think and move out of your comfort zone. 'What more is required that a kind of stupid, insensitive doggedness, as lover, as writer, together with a readiness to fail and fail again?' A beautiful and taut novel.
—Vasudha
I believe it was Mary Knott, librarian and friend, who recommended this author to me. In my usual pickiness over fiction, I probably would not have had the joy of reading it had it not been one of my only options to trade for at a hostal we passed through.I am not often a reader of fiction, and so it is sometimes hard for me to describe how I experience it (do I say this in all of my reviews of fiction?). This book is about the 1960s, London, South Africa, and work. But Coetzee has primarily written about, as titled, youth (especially the mentality of it) and all of its ups and down. The main character is something of a Catcher in the Rye Holden Caulfield, he is many things to sympathize with, judge, laugh at, and sigh for all in one. His thoughts are practical, linked, natural yet irrational. They are big picture idealism that`s hitting a brick wall in the real world. He is a loner, an individual, bitter and grumpy, dreamy and brave. These things are youth, I suppose.My 25-year-old husband and 28-year-old self were amused that a book titled “Youth” is about someone around our age, because we forget we are still in it, but we are a bit of those things still. Hopefully we will remain the best of them, too. I enjoyed Youth. Will I return to Coetzee? I`m not sure, but I will certainly recommend him.
—Christy S
Coetzee’s Youth is about aSouth African Mathematics student, who flees his politically instable countryto work as a computer programmer in the United Kingdom of the 1950s. Hisambitions there is to follow his idles TS Eliot and Ezra pound, and become apoet, in England, which was the home of most of the greatest poets of theEnglish language. Instead this work is dull, and England has a greater need for his services as an employee, than for his artistic talent. Poems will not increase the country’s economy as much as his work as IBM’s programmer, so the main character in that book, called Youth, gives up writing and becomes a fulltime programmer. He accepts the fact that while his writing career could no toffer him much money, and would most probably make him live in Poverty and misery, his nine to five job as a computer programmer, was more surely going to give him a steady income, housing, food, a decent future, and above allindependence.I liked the book a lot because I can identify very much with the main character in the book. I know how it is to be so interested in poetry, surprised about the fact that British are less interested in poetry than expected of a people to whom the greatest poets belonged to, having to work boring jobs to support your almost non existent literary career, and joining creative writing groups that do little to change the situation.flag
—Eric
