The beloved, the destined one, will see at once through the odd and even dull exterior he presents to the fire that burns within him. He may not believe in God but he does believe in love and the powers of love. What will cure him, if it were to arrive, will be love. It reads as a cold confessional, as the narrator stumbles along in the dark trying to discover what has gone wrong in his life and why both Love and Art, two things he associates with one another, have forsaken him: While this may not be an original theme as such, the novel is written in the third person, present tense which gives it a kind of Kafkaesque starkness. Throughout the novel, John is generally lonely, unkind, bored, frightened and unappealing. While waiting fruitlessly for the muse to strike, John becomes involved in a number of unsatisfactory relationships, attends arty films, writes a few bad poems and takes on two programming jobs.

John is a hard character to stomach because we have been there. The story is tortuous because it reminds its readers of something that seems to go hand and hand with youth – the desire for glory, for greatness, for artistic achievement and admiration without the tedious work of application. Whatever parallels there may be to Coetzee’s young life, this book is clearly a novel, and it deserves to be judged as a complete work. Many critics have argued that this sparse Beckettian novel is really a memoir, to be read as a prelude to Coetzee’s own great writing career.

Youth is a short and tortuous novel which follows John, a young man with lofty literary aspirations through a mathematics degree, a move from a politically unstable South Africa to London where he works towards a Masters degree in literature and begins work as a computer programmer.

Youth coetzee