| Product Summary | | Format: Paperback | | ISBN: 9780140265668 | | Publisher: Penguin Books | | Publish Date: 4/10/2007 | | Buy.com Sku: 30359589 | | Item#: R6HCDT | | Dimensions (in Inches) 7.5H x 5L x 0.5T |
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| | | J.M. Coetzee grew up in a new development north of Cape Town, with a father he despised and a mother he both adored and resented. Bold and telling, this masterly evocation of a young boy's life under apartheid is the book Coetzee's many admirers have been waiting for. "Exceptional. . . . A scorched tale of race, caste, shame, and--at times--hilarious bewilderment".--THE NEW YORKER.
Annotation:
A memoir of growing up in South Africa during the 1940s and 1950s, written by the Booker 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.
| PraiseKirkus
"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..." 08/15/1997Salon
"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." 09/12/1997 Guardian (London)
"Coetzee's strange, hard, impacted intelligence is one of the most powerful in contemporary literature." - James Wood Atlantic Monthly
"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 October 1997 Washington Post Book World
"'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 09/21/1997 Literary Review
"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 October 1997 New York Times Book 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 11/02/1997 |
| Author Bio| J. M. Coetzee | | J. (John) M. (Maxwell) Coetzee came from a sheep-farming family, but his father was also a lawyer and his mother a teacher. Coetzee studied both mathematics and English at the University of Cape Town, and after graduation took a job as a computer programmer. He came to the U.S. at the age of 25 to attend the University of Texas, where he received a Ph.D. in linguistics; he then taught at SUNY Buffalo for three years in the 1960s. He moved back to Capetown in 1971 and began to write fiction that reflected South Africa's political situation without writing about it explicitly. His fourth book, THE LIFE AND TIMES OF MICHAEL K., won the Booker Prize in 1983, as did DISGRACE, his twelfth, in 1999. In 2003, Coetzee was awarded--to his complete shock, he said in interviews--the Nobel Prize in Literature. The Nobel committee, which called the choice an "easy" one, called Coetzee "a scrupulous doubter, ruthless in his criticism of the cruel rationalism and cosmetic morality of Western civilization." A reclusive and very private man, Coetzee has been married and divorced; he has a daughter, and his only son was killed in an accident at the age of 23. Author Rian Malan describes Coetzee as: "A man of almost monkish self-discipline and dedication. He does not drink, smoke or eat meat. He cycles vast distances to keep fit and spends at least an hour at his writing-desk each morning, seven days a week. A colleague who has worked with him for more than a decade claims to have seen him laugh just once." Coetzee has spent his life quietly, teaching at universities (often in the U.S.) and producing a steady stream of critically acclaimed literature. He has, however, written an autobiography--BOYHOOD: SCENES FROM PROVINCIAL LIFE--in which he recounts his gradually dawning distaste for the imperialism and racism that, in South Africa, culminated in apartheid. In 2002, he became a citizen of Australia. |
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