Twice winner of the Booker Prize, J M Coetzee, chronicler of
fragile, disrupted individuals and societies, here turns his gaze
on a young man whose search for the supposed joys and fulfilments
of youth leaves him constantly empty-handed. It is the 1960s, and
John is a confused student in his native South Africa. Desperately
ashamed of both his country and his family, he longs to escape to
one of the poetic European cities he reads about. He manages to
reach London, but the city is grey and miserable and his job as a
computer programmer for IBM hard and unromantic. Lonely and
culturally dislocated, he finds himself unable to write the poetry
he hoped to, and his relationships and sexual encounters seem empty
compared to the intellectual and hedonistic joys he longs for. This
is an astonishingly accomplished deptiction of a youth whose dreams
bear no relation to reality and who is struggling to come to terms
with himself during a time of great change for the world, both
politically and technologically. Cut off from the true
companionship of others, his only mental sustenance comes from
literature and cinema, which he thinks about obsessively as his
mind turns in on itself. Through the consciousness of a man
terrified of failure and yet doomed to it we see a bleak landscape
of misery and alienation. A masterpiece. (Kirkus UK)
Youth's narrator, a student in 1950s South Africa, has long been plotting an escape from his native country. Studying mathematics, reading poetry, saving money, he tries to ensure that when he arrives in the real world he will be prepared to experience life to its full intensity, and transform it into art. Arriving at last in London, however, he finds neither poetry nor romance. Instead he succumbs to the monotony of life as a computer programmer, from which random, loveless affairs offer no relief. Devoid of inspiration, he stops writing and begins a dark pilgrimage in which he is continually tested and continually found wanting. Set against the background of the 1960s, Youth is a remarkable portrait of a consciousness turning in on itself.
J. M. Coetzee explores a young man's struggle to find his way in the world with tenderness and a fierce clarity.
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