Boyhood by JM Coetzee (1997)

 This is my first Coetzee. I know very little about the arc of his career, aside from the prizes. The first impression is of starkness, a boniness and pared-downness. But not poetry so much, though the prose sings very quietly. The feeling is that anything which was pronounced enough to be labelled 'poetic' would be a little distasteful to him. There are two things which seem critical: the depiction of himself here, and the broad fact that autobiography is reconstructed reality, has narrative structure retro-applied. It's the story of himself when young, in the South Africa of the 40s turning to the 50s. There is some talk of race, some of unthinking conservatism, some of the dryness and leachedness one might expect. Those things decorate a tale of his parents' unhappy marriage, of farms versus proto-suburbia, of family skeletons and melancholy, frustration and wondering. And there is the closer-in perspective of the child's world, dominated by school, and growing apprehension of what the adult world that impinges upon childhood might mean. Here is where both critical concerns come into play. He seems to know a great deal about his parents' crushednesses and fallibilities, seems very involved in their world and its story. This has a glimmer of reconstruction to it, and the concomitant purpose of making retro-fitted sense of what went on - would they have been intelligible in this fashion at the time in the way he portrays? Not a problem if not, if the reasons why have needed an adult mind to establish them, but then why portray himself as having agency in it at the time, and its dominance in his young world, as he does? Perhaps the situation was unusual, and he was involved to that extent. The other concern, that of the depiction of himself, is notable. The image that plays in my mind is a bit fanciful: the young Coetzee here has the resonance of a clay idol, a bit of a tiki. It has the glaring quality that goes with these, and the staring-eyed fierceness - anything could happen with this untamed demiurge, it blazes and is convex with urgency. And lacks a kind of softness and vulnerability, like he's seeing himself extra-starkly and finds engaging with the part of himself which is silly, humorous, even dear, as beyond the pale. Is this the Coetzee story, the 'thing' I need to recognize which is most typifying about his work? The potential shibboleth of extreme honesty works strongly here, with his desires, disgusts and cruelty self-mercilessly examined. Well, who ever knows how much of an autobiography is truthfully flagellatory, as against management for effect?