Youth by JM Coetzee (2002)

 The thing that strikes me about this, like the first volume of the trilogy, Boyhood, is the blankness of some parts of the narrator's personality. I say 'narrator', just to acknowledge the fact that a narrative has been created here, we're not in some world of immediate reportage in-the-real. I think many of us have that friend we can think of who seems to exhibit a kind of carefulness and hesitancy, a lack of spontaneity and love of cautious order, who holds back and seems inhibited, to the point of slightly unresponsive blankness. I think Coetzee in these times may well have been one of these people. Alongside this impassivity, he is enormously well-armed with information. The level of detail here about his life in London in the early 60s indicates that he had a penchant for diary-writing and the retention of correspondence. That has had one good result, if my supposition about this is correct - he has had such access to who he was in that time that he has been able, at least in part, to send himself up a little. At least I hope that's what he's doing. There is the faintest sense, deep in the weave, of the fact that, while representing as exactly as he can the workings of his youthful mind, and making sure that they add up to a 'complete' picture (albeit hamstrung by personality) which does not comment on the action from posterity's haughty hindsight, he is also smiling slightly at how obsessed or self-defeating he was, however quietly. He is making sure we know which subjects were important to this guy, and raising an important point in the process: this is an autobiography without that hindsight, meant as a record from exclusively within its times, not benefiting from the wisdom that came later. This is an interesting experiment; fundamentally, I don't know how successful it can be, mainly because he is looking back from a much later standpoint, and even if he's scrupulous about retaining the contemporaneous perspective, it seems likely that the now of the writing will impinge in some fashion, perhaps with regard to choice of matter, perhaps having reference to some wider view of what this book was 'designed' in the less conscious sense to achieve. Coetzee here is a mildly interesting fellow, with a young man's love of poetry, and quests into sex, love and the writing art. A man very much like so many, self included, that I suppose it can function as an everyman-portrait. But the straining after art is still at this point quite ordinary. I'll be interested to read (in the next volume?) of the time when things began to change up. Not bowled over by this at all, but just patiently interested.