Youth opens with the narrator John studying at the University of Cape Town in the early 1960’s. He lives a solitary life having rejected his parents and finds it hard to make friends. He dreams of one day becoming a poet, and has strong opinions about other contemporary writers:
“As for his own writing, he would hope to leave behind, were he to die tomorrow, a handful of poems that, edited by some selfless scholar and privately printed in neat little duodecimo pamphlet, would make people shake their heads and murmur beneath their breath ‘Such promise! Such a waste’.”
He moves to London in search of a job and a girlfriend. Finding work in 1960s England was obviously very easy because he is inundated with offers, and accepts a role programming computers for IBM. He feels this mundane work is beneath him, and outside the office spends his time seeking out a partner and a life of culture. Eventually he resigns this role trying to focus on his writing. Unable to avoid the need to earn a living, reluctantly he ungraciously accepts another computing job, this time working for International Computers in the suburbs. The text closes with the narrator having made little progress in his search for fulfilment.
Is this a novel or a memoir? I am not sure. The publisher offers few clues. The text is written in the third person, but the events closely track those of Coetzee’s own life suggesting a semi-autobiographical format. The ambiguity is quite deliberate of course – it is left to the reader to decide how to respond. As a novel Youth fails on almost all counts – the central character is a boring prig, obnoxious towards the women in his life, snobbish towards almost everyone he meets, and a terrible poet. There’s little incident or narrative in the text, and the sense of time and place is weak. It rains a lot in London, and Londoners are suspicious of foreigners. That’s the level of insight. The narrator is strangely, unrealistically successful in seducing young women, but avoids any kind of intimacy beyond the physical. He’s a horrible person and spending time in his company wasn’t fun.
As a memoir it is on the other hand brutally honest. Few people would portray themselves so unblinkingly as such an unpleasant, shallow, snobbish bore. The New York Times review of Youth nailed it when it said that it ” covers that period of a man’s life when he’s most repulsive both to himself and others.” Hermione Lee in the London Review of Books concluded that “Youth is the ultimately alienated and alienating autobiography: not an inward exploration, or an ethical indictment of the author/subject, but a self-parody.” That may be taking it too far – I had the impression that Coetzee simply wanted to be honest about this period of his life and decided not to spare the awful details. Which is fine as an exercise in exorcism, but it didn’t make the novel/memoir any easier or interesting to read. Coetzee is a better novelist than a biographer – perhaps it would be better to leave this role to someone with more objectivity than the author himself?
The choice of cover illustration is interesting – a sparsely populated Trafalgar Square at dusk, shrouded in mist. The paperback edition uses the same location but it’s pouring with rain, just in case anyone missed the point that the weather in the UK isn’t up to South African standards! On the one hand this is textually an inappropriate setting to choose – the narrator makes it clear he has avoided all tourist traps such as this. At the same time Nelson’s Column is obviously an instantly and easily recognisable landmark. I wonder whether there isn’t a subtle hint that the author/narrator aspires to a similar iconic status? I suppose with two Booker Prizes and a Nobel under his belt he could claim he is well on the way?
The Reading Bug 