Coetzee Coetzee Cooo

Youth is the story of a young white South African man who wants to be an artist and moves to London. Even in South Africa, his home, J.M. Coetzee seems to feel out of place. He reminds me of Anita Brookner, in some ways, incapable of connecting, in any real sense, to life. Very un-E.M. Forster with his "Only connect!". In South Africa he feels that "between black and white there is a gulf fixed. Deeper than pity, deeper than honourable dealings, deeper even than goodwill, lies an awareness on both sides that people like Paul and himself, with their pianos and violins, are here on this earth, the earth of South Africa, on the shakiest of pretexts. ....when the ground beneath his feet is soaked with blood and the vast backward depth of history rings with shouts of anger..". In London he feels superior to everyone and no one even notices. He fails to connect or become a great writer in the span of the book.

It ends with the thought that to be a writer "...what more is required than a kind of stupid, insensitive doggedness, as lover, as writer together with a readiness to fail and fail again?" The narrator is cold and selfish and convinced that he belongs with a beautiful passionate woman and treats all the other timid plain women he becomes entangled with very poorly. It is like the Philip Larkin poem Wild Oats:

About twenty years ago
Two girls came in where I worked
-A bosomy English rose
And her friend in specs I could talk to.
Faces in those days sparked
The whole shooting-match off, and I doubt
If ever one had like hers:
But it was the friend I took out,

And in seven years after that
Wrote over four hundred letters,
Gave a ten-guinea ringI got back in the end, and met
At numerous cathedral cities
Unknown to the clergy.
I believeI met beautiful twice. She was trying
Both times (so I thought) not to laugh.

Parting, after about five
Rehearsals, was an agreement
That I was too selfish, withdrawn
And easily bored to love.
Well, useful to get that learnt,
In my wallet are still two snaps,
Of bosomy Rose with fur gloves on.
Unlucky charms, perhaps.

Coetzee's narrator wants a bosomy Rose and has trouble realizing he doesn't deserve her. He doesn't deserve to be an artist either, but if the book is halfway autobiographical I suppose he becomes one.