Youth: Scenes from Provincial Life II
Books / Paperback
ISBN: 0142002003 / Publisher: Penguin Books, October 2003
Hoping to escape his South African home, dysfunctional family, and what he believes to be an impending revolution, a young man becomes disappointed with his monotonous new life in London and begins a dark pilgrimage.
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J.M. Coetzee's latest novel, The Schooldays of Jesus, is now available from Viking. Late Essays: 2006-2016 will be available January 2018. The second installment of J. M. Coetzee's fictionalized "memoir" explores a young man's struggle to experience life to its full intensity and transform it into art. The narrator of Youth has long been plotting an escape-from the stifling love of his overbearing mother, a father whose failures haunt him, and what he is sure is impending revolution in his native country of South Africa. Arriving at last in London in the 1960s, however, he finds neither poetry nor romance and instead begins a dark pilgrimage into adulthood. Youth is a remarkable portrait of a consciousness, isolated and adrift, turning in on itself, of a young man struggling to find his way in the world, written with tenderness and a fierce clarity.
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