Youth -- an impasse between who we were and who we will be, a time of incessant pondering on the purpose of our existence, and also the title of JM Coetzee's semi-fictional autobiographical masterpiece. An amalgamation of everything wrong and right with those 'growing up' years, Youth portrays an isolated, lost, adrift young man struggling to fit in a self-made concoction of his ideal 'place' in the world.Youth makes one hate, sympathize, understand, scorn and love the narrator (Coetzee himself) in turns. Reading Youth one finds oneself in front of a mirror that shows an image that is overtly unknown and yet covertly so familiar. Youth is so awfully human that it will induce a rueful grin on the faces of even the most stoic of us.
Our narrator, John, is an Afrikaner, an Afrikaan speaking dutch descendant living in South Africa in 1960's. The autobiography novel traces his life from a mathematics student (and struggling poet) at the Cape Town University in South Africa to a computer programmer (and a struggling poet) for International Computers in England. The narrator leaves his native land, not only in hopes of an orgastic future in London where dwelled the likes of Ford Maddox Ford and T.S Elliot (his literary pedagogues), but to escape the impending revolution of the blacks and the coloreds in the discrimination reeking mid-Apartheid South Africa. The complete title of the book is Youth: Scenes from a provincial life II. Now if that 'provincial life' signifies a narrow minded South Africa or a paralyzing London, can't be concretely said. What can be concretely said is that the narrator in Youth is a shell of a man trying to fill himself with "destiny" that he thinks can only be found in "big cities like London."
"He is proving something: that each man is an island," this is how page 3, paragraph 2 of the novel incepts. Separated from his overbearing mother and a failure of a father, the narrator though makes constant efforts at distancing (or escaping?) himself from anything reminiscent of South Africa, has a Joycean relationship with his native land. Like James Joyce, John (cum Coetzee) bleats the paralysis of South Africa while simultaneously being unable to stop talking about it. "He has escaped South Africa", he says. While in reality, he remains intertwined in that 'provincial paralysis' of his 'Aboriginal' state throughout the journey that is Youth. He asserts, "South Africa is a wound oh him (sic). How much longer before the wound stops bleeding."
The most enthralling constituent of Youth is the melancholy reality of it. Coatzee perfectly narrates the imperfections of his younger self by combining them with the garrulous faculties of fiction. Our narrator is so succumbed in his pursuit of becoming an artist that he starts losing touch with art itself. In a Gallery in England he "For a quarter of an hour stands before a Jackson Pollock, giving it a chance to penetrate him, trying to look judicious in case some suave Londoner has an eye on this provincial ignoramus. It does not help. The painting means nothing to him. There is something about it he does not get." And with the passage of time the abyss between him and his art grows larger and larger. But as the magnitude of that abyss becomes infinite, he comes to the realization that he can't exhaust himself chasing art as at twenty four he "is not an artist", he is a "computer programmer".
Youth is brave and beautiful. Brave in the sense that it so candidly reveals the callow obsession of a would-be poet (or a poet wannabe), and beautiful in the sense that it's an honest account of youthful naïveté. Streaming with thematic sombre, Youth also eludes to an underlying optimism that keeps one wanting for more -- more of John, more of Coetzee and more of Youth.
