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Boyhood: Scenes From Provincial Life | 
 enlarge | Author: J. M. Coetzee
Publisher: Penguin (Non-Classics)
Category: Book
List Price: $14.00
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Rating:  14 reviews
Sales Rank: 71977
Media: Paperback
Pages: 176
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.3
Dimensions (in): 7.7 x 5.1 x 0.5
ISBN: 014026566X
Dewey Decimal Number: 823
EAN: 9780140265668
ASIN: 014026566X
Publication Date: September 1, 1998
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Amazon.com Review
Until writing this book, the author of Waiting for the Barbarians and other acclaimed novels has remained determinedly private about the personal experiences that sparked his writing. In Boyhood, describing his youth in the third person, J. M. Coetzee limns the halting struggle toward maturity of a sensitive, bookish boy contemptuous of his weak father who yearns--and fears--to loosen a powerful attachment to his mother. He evokes the narrowness and cruelty of South African society in the years following World War II with the same austere yet passionate prose that distinguishes his fiction.
Product Description
Coetzee grew up in a new development north of Cape Town, tormented by guilt and fear. With a father he despised, and a mother he both adored and resented, he led a double life--the brilliant and well-behaved student at school, the princely despot at home, 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 high 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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| Customer Reviews: Read 9 more reviews...
 Coetzee's Childhood Story December 7, 2000
Katherine Neis (Harrisburg, Pa United States)
9 out of 11 found this review helpful
Here we finally have the privilige of reading a little about Coetzee's past and some of the experiences that have shaped him into the author he is today. As a young boy in Cape Town, he is an exemplary student scoring at the top of his class for most everything except for English (surprisingly enough). On the homefront, however, he is a completely different boy. His father is an uninvolved father to say the least. His mother tries to make up for his father by being a wonderful support and help. Too often, though, she is choking with her affection and Coetzee vacillates between intense love and dislike for her. He also appears to be a fearful and dramatic child. He is afraid someone will find out he is not a "real" Catholic, that he'll be terribly embarassed in front of all his friends and not know what to do, that the double life he leads at home and at school will be detected, etc., etc. He is bound by these fears in that instead of believing that if any one of these things actually did happen, life would certainly go on as it did before, he feels as if he would surely die. Granted, he probably means this in the figurative sense, yet it reveals extreme dramatical tendencies for a boy his age. This inclination may have been the root to the imagination that has matured into the creative and intuitive authorship Coetzee has come to be known for today. A little slow-going in the beginning, Boyhood picks up nicely after 100 pages and finishes off just as well.
 An unsentimental childhood June 4, 2000
Lindsay van Niekerk (Melbourne, Australia)
7 out of 7 found this review helpful
Having grown up in Cape Town in the 1960's at a time before apartheid was rigorously enforced, JM Coetzee's account of his boyhood, while on the surface austere and aparently joyless, was pure pleasure for me to read. I revelled in the absolute accuracy of his descriptions and the ruthless, heartless honesty of a child who must function in a world that is often alien and confusing. It brought back numerous incidents of my own childhood - the stuff that nowadays is unacceptable to disclose. Along with Tobias Wolf's This Boys Life and Truffaut's The 400 Blows, Boyhood is a wonderfully honest record of childhood.
Spare, but wonderfully insightful September 18, 2002
J. F Malysiak (Chicago, IL USA)
7 out of 7 found this review helpful
Touching, illuminative, and compulsively readable, the first volume of South African writer J.M. Coetzee's "autobiography" is a wonderful introduction to the writer if you aren't familiar with him (as I wasn't). His prose style is spare but descriptive, and conveys South Africa in the late '40s and early '50s as seen through the eyes of a child. Not big on "plot," but based more upon observation, Boyhood is a quiet triumph.
A killing-you-softly tale December 15, 1998
6 out of 6 found this review helpful
Not quite a memoir, not quite fiction, Boyhood is elegant and powerful in the way of J.M. Coetzee's novels, only more so. A white boy growing up in post-WW2 South Africa may not appear an awfully exciting proposition. But this is not quite a book on South Africa, either. Its images will disturb you, lead you astray: at times Boyhood reads like a darkly intriguing fairy-tale. The detached third-person narrative has surprising effects: the story becomes more moving, the thinking more probing. Perhaps the truly African ingredient here is the passion beneath the simple sentences on common enough childhood experiences. A rare book that will tug at your heart, despite the author's reputation for "austerity" and "intellectually forbidding" writing.
Moments April 19, 2003
nicolemoshi (Hong Kong)
6 out of 7 found this review helpful
A fairly intriguing portrayal of one's boyhood - though in a subdued manner. Hard, clean, unsentimental narration with great psychological insights - just what you'd expect from a good writer as Coetzee. The portrayl of the mother-son relationship is pretty deep, of his complicated feelings towards her: a mixture of reliance and contempt, of love and fear, with an undertone of sympathy and admiration from the grown up narrator. Scenes of Coetzee among others - classmates, relatives, etc. are discontinuous, fragmented memories, depicting the formation of self. One has to understand some of these in relation to the African society at that time though, so a little background information will help.
I wouldnt think of this book as a classic, but it does have one of the most profound moments in contemporary memoirs. There's this moment when Coetzee recalls his first childhood memory: of him sitting next to his mother on the bus, and him letting something go in the wind. I wont go into details - I'd only say that moment is everything: memories, love, understanding; the beginning of self-awarenes, of one's relation to things, to the outside world; of the sadness and happiness deep inside that one cannot describe.
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