The word that remains in your head after reading this novel is "misery." The color one remembers is gray. Were the writing less controlled, and the events more cinematic, it would be a film noir. But a film noir is rarely funny, and this book, though seemingly dreary, has funny moments (hence my 5-star rating). Anyone who reads "Youth" in the expectation of finding out what Coetzee's own youth was like will be disappointed. The youth in question is named John, but whether it's J.M. Coetzee we're reading about we're not to know. My (British) edition of the book states firmly on the dust jacket that it is fiction.
So. Most of the action takes place inside John's head. There is little in the way of conversation. Readers familiar with Coetzee's spare writing and use of present-tense narrative will feel quite at home. In fact, this novel, like others by Coetzee, will go down as easily as frozen yogurt. Some readers may think, at the end "What was that all about?" To them I say (as I'm saying to myself) "Read it again." I have at this point read "Youth" only once. A second reading allows one to forget the direction of the plot, and concentrate on other aspects. I would say that, after a single reading, some of the characters other than John seem more real than he does. John has left home and hearth behind, and isn't as happy as he thinks he ought to be. When I try to think of a way to describe him, Britishisms like "sullen cove" and "dismal Jimmy" come to mind. But I do care what happens to him. I know the feeling. At the same time "John" was a miserable provincial in London, I was a miserable small-town girl adrift in a gritty, cold city. But John's misery, in part, derives from his idea of himself, which borders on the overblown. One gets, well, impatient with him. If this John is the same as the boy in "Boyhood," he has changed. The boy John was a likeable kid, albeit a little strange. The older John is less likeable, perhaps because he expects everyone to think he's either a) a genius or b) a great lover, though deep down he's aware that he's neither. No wonder he's miserable. So cry me a river, Coetzee. You're not the only one who had a hard time growing up. As for the rest of you: read the book. It'll grow on you.

Books like J.M. Coetzee's "Youth" are few and far between. Just like with his novel "Disgrace," I was absolutely riveted.

In this autobiographical work, Coetzee describes a young man in his twenties. John longs to escape his life in South Africa and to seek out his destiny in one of the capitals of Europe. He chooses London and struggles to embark on the writing life whilst trying to make ends meet by working as a computer programmer. Such a "mundane" existence -- not to mention a string of one-night stands and failed relationships -- can put a damper on youthful ideals as John is soon to find out.

Coetzee's achievement is his ability to faithfully capture the thoughts, the idealism, and the misconceptions of a green twenty-something -- and all without making John seem overly exasperating or unsympathetic.

And what a prose stylist this author is! For instance, chapter 8 contains a wonderfully breathless description of Henry James's writing style that is both humorous and rather true. Descriptions of IBM and John's experience there are quietly hilarious. You can't help but laugh aloud at times.

These moments of levity are balanced out with a sense of sad confusion as John struggles to find himself and his voice. His confusion is the confusion we have all experienced at different points in our lives. Turning the final pages of this wise and elegant book, the reader longs for this youth's eventual success.

"Happy people are not interesting. Better to accept the burden of unhappiness and try to turn it into something worthwhile, poetry or music or painting" (p. 14). This is the central theme of Booker-Prize-winning author, J. M. Coetzee's 169-page memoir, which follows its brooding, third-person narrator, John, from South Africa to London in the 1960s. Although he accepts a soul-draining, computer programming job at IBM, Coetzee's protagonist has literary aspirations. His evenings are spent reading Ezra Pound and Ford Madox Ford, going to the cinema, and searching for an English girl "so foolish as to fall in love with him" (p. 134). Is it possible, he wonders in his isolation, that he was not made to love women (pp. 78-9). With sparse strokes, Coetzee draws a memorable self portrait of a tortured artist in his YOUTH.

G. Merritt

This is a fantastic tale of two young women - thoroughly engaging. Anyone who wants to learn about what it was like to live in Apartheid South Africa should read this book, however it would appeal to any young woman who knows what it is to have friendship. Despite the author being my grandmother - I can honestly recommend this book to all ages. It is a wonderful piece of fiction that is not to be missed!

'Age of Iron' is typical Coetzee material in that it is extremely well written and portrays South Africa, in this case 1980s South Africa, as a very strange place where its national psyche is badly twisted. In 'Age of Iron' the narrator is a elderly white woman dying of cancer. Not only does she no longer understand her country she has trouble grasping the notion of life, death and in-between. And then a homeless black man comes into her life (..she let's him in) and then she really starts pouring out here emotions.

On one level I really liked 'Age of Iron'. Coetzee doesn't hold back on his brutal account of a country broken by apartheid. And much of the dialogue between the dying woman and her homeless friend is most thought-provoking. However the author has a tendency to over-cook the dialogue, stretching to the point of being a dissertation of all the evils of mankind. It is as if Coetzee couldn't restrain himself from telling the world how smart he is. Message to Coetzee: less would have be more, much more.

Bottom line: certainly an intriguing yet rather flawed novel.

Mrs. Curren is an old woman dying of cancer in the heart of South Africa during a period of political as well as literal war. A Classics professor, she has always had the gift of expression yet with the horrors going on around her, her inclination grows even stronger and she begins to channel her thoughts and emotions into a long letter to her daughter who has immigrated to America years ago. The day she finds out she has cancer, a vagrant and his dog show up in her yard whom she allows to work around her home for food and a pittance. Meanwhile, young men around her are being killed in the name of comradery while adults sit idly by and soothe their guilty conscience's with ideas of bravory and grandor. Mrs. Curren seems to be the only one dead-set against all the hatred and killing. She expresses her opinions to her vagrant friend, Vercueil, and to her daughter. She asks Vercueil to promise to send the letter when she is gone. And she resigns herself to an end to the life she knows in her war-torn country. Yet she pretends to be stalling it all the same..."So I am well guarded. Death would think twice before trying to pass this dog, this man." Once again, Coetzee hits on a vitally important issue among the living; that is, whether to support war as a means of fighting for freedom and victory or to put down one's weapons knowing that one more young life taken will not alone decide the fate of an entire country.

This book really takes us inside just how disconcerting life must be, must have been, within the waning years of Apartheid for those whites in South Africa who grew up with this horrendous system yet could not contemplate their lives with out it, even if they were not actively racist themselves. The female lead's, and Coetzee always astounds me with his writing from a female perspective (I wonder if actual females would agree), confusion in dealing with the later years of Apartheid allow us to view in sympathy those whites caught up in the system by circumstance while not ignoring the great tragedy that Apartheid was to the Black majority. It also sheds a light on the perception issues that we face in the United States across the racial divide.

I leave off a "star" only because viewing Kentridge's drawings can not substitute the experience of viewing his films. Indeed, looking the charcoal drawings I wonder at what stage of the sequence it is in. Is this the last step in the drawing? Looking at a drawing outside of its time base can also be a positive. I love searching the surface for smudge marks and erased hands and arms. His drawings end up being a record of movement (something that most single drawings fail to capture). For anyone who doesn't know, by the way, Kentridge animates his charcoal drawings using filmic stop motion techniques. The results are amazing. Anyone interested in drawing and painting, the birth of early film, and South African Politics: here is your artist.

William Kentridge is a white South African born in 1955. He is best known for animations, based on large charcoal paintings, which have as their subject the complexity of living a meaningful life in the warped society of South Africa.

Kentridge makes the films by working on the charcoal paintings, then clicking the film camera one frame at a time. He then walks back to the painting and works on it, before exposing another twenty-fifth of a second.

Kentridge is articulate and interesting and has established himself as a great artist in the tradition of Hogarth, Daumier and the German expressionists. His exhibition, which closed here in Los Angeles last week, was breathtaking. This book is the catalog of that exhibition.

A fairly intriguing portrayal of one's boyhood - though in a subdued manner. Hard, clean, unsentimental narration with great psychological insights - just what you'd expect from a good writer as Coetzee. The portrayl of the mother-son relationship is pretty deep, of his complicated feelings towards her: a mixture of reliance and contempt, of love and fear, with an undertone of sympathy and admiration from the grown up narrator. Scenes of Coetzee among others - classmates, relatives, etc. are discontinuous, fragmented memories, depicting the formation of self. One has to understand some of these in relation to the African society at that time though, so a little background information will help.
I wouldnt think of this book as a classic, but it does have one of the most profound moments in contemporary memoirs. There's this moment when Coetzee recalls his first childhood memory: of him sitting next to his mother on the bus, and him letting something go in the wind. I wont go into details - I'd only say that moment is everything: memories, love, understanding; the beginning of self-awarenes, of one's relation to things, to the outside world; of the sadness and happiness deep inside that one cannot describe.

So far I have preferred this brief novel over all the other Coetzee works I have read. It is not the most acclaimed novel, but somehow it is the most personal and accessible of his works. The others are challenging, yes, and subtle. Boyhood, though, is something deeply felt, still subtle, but very much something powerful and something people can relate to when they read it.
The autobiographical story focuses on the narrator, a boy who has moved to a housing estate with his family-to a place with streets named after trees although there are no trees. A place with servant's rooms and no servants. The family is nothing like most of the other families around or indeed in much of South Africa. He lives in a strange world where children are not beaten, adults are called by their first names, they do not attend church, they are not Afrikaners... and in school when he is asked to declare a religion, he does not even understand the significance of declaring himself Catholic because he did not know what else to say. His upbringing is unusual and unnatural, in his opinion, because it involved no beatings. His father was an alcoholic and might have beaten him if the mother had not been so severely overprotective and against beatings. The narrator believes that if only once he were to be beaten he would suddenly be turned into a "normal" boy. There are frequent school beatings, but he does everything humanly possible to avoid those beatings because he knows he would never be able to bear the embarrassment of his reaction to being beat in school.
At the centre of the boy's world is his mother whom he loves and reveres at the same time as being repelled by her very nature. She loves him in an overbearing and overprotective way; she changes her mind and mood often and contradicts herself constantly-he feels his life and world is crumbling around him with her fickle contradictions. He thoroughly belonged to her.
He hates formulas, small talk and "being normal" or dull. His mother's family accepts his eccentricities; his father and his family do not. While he is deeply in love with the farm on his father's side of the family, he rarely gets to go there because he is an unwelcome guest. He feels free there, like he belongs to the farm. "He has two mothers. Twice-born: born from a woman and born from the farm. Two mothers and no father."
Mostly his entire adolescence is pervaded by uptight guilt and worry. Everything is his fault. When he begins to realise his sexual awakening, he ponders, "That is how the questioning always works. At first it may wander here and there; but in the end, unfailingly, it turns and gathers itself and points a finger at himself. Always it is he who sets the train of thinking in motion; always it is the thinking that slips out of his control and returns to accuse him. Beauty is innocence; innocence is ignorance; ignorance is ignorance of pleasure; pleasure is guilty; he is guilty."
Through the eyes of the adolescent narrator the book offers so many glimpses into routine, daily life and common ideas, stereotypes, and matter of fact questioning of life through the naïve eyes of a boy. He reveals his embarrassment about the conventions of how Coloureds and whites are supposed to interact. He has a great deal of curiosity about the lives of the Coloureds and how they live. He reveals a deep hatred for Afrikaners and their inner rage. He worries that he will be moved to an Afrikaner class rather than an English one because he has an Afrikaner name. He excels in English and is deeply proud of his distance from the Afrikaner way of life, something in which he will never be "fluent". He has a strange reverence for England and all things English. He hears rumours that, although the Boer War is not on the official school syllabus, that Afrikaner classes are taught lessons about it as the "2nd War of Liberation". He feels guilt when he wastes food. (He and his younger brother take eggs that have been delivered to their house and throw them at another house. "Perhaps elsewhere in the world one can throw eggs; but in this country there are judges who will judge by standards of righteousness. In this country one cannot be thoughtless about food.")
When he seems to be settled into a certain routine, the family moves to Cape Town because his father is going to resume the practise of law. Unfortunately the practise is short-lived because the father drinks too much and in his need for "approval" unwisely lends money that isn't his to lend. The family is financially destroyed. And while the boy once loved school, he has grown to feel only passionate rage and nervousness all the time. Cape Town is making him grow stupid and provides no challenges. The bitterness of awkward adolescence dawns: he does not like himself and constantly feels embarrassed. Something to which we can all relate.
"'Wait until you have children of you own,' she says to him in one of her bitterer moods. 'Then you will know.' What will he know? It is a formula she uses, a formula that sounds as if it comes from the old days. Perhaps it is what each generation says to the next, as a warning, as a threat. But he does not want to hear it. 'Wait until you have children.' What nonsense, what a contradiction! How can a child have children? Anyway, what he would know if he were a father, if he were his own father, is precisely what he does not want to know. He will not accept the vision that she wants to force upon him: sober, disappointed, disillusioned."
As with most Coetzee novels there is no great "ending". It just ends. It feels better that way. The book simply speaks for itself which its eloquence and elegance, even in conveying the awkward and gangly phases of a young boy's life.

Touching, illuminative, and compulsively readable, the first volume of South African writer J.M. Coetzee's "autobiography" is a wonderful introduction to the writer if you aren't familiar with him (as I wasn't). His prose style is spare but descriptive, and conveys South Africa in the late '40s and early '50s as seen through the eyes of a child. Not big on "plot," but based more upon observation, Boyhood is a quiet triumph.

Things just happen : that's the sum total of wisdom.
-Torless, Young Torless

Torless, the young man of the title, leaves home to attend a boarding school in turn of the century Austria. For the first time he is freed from the moral influence of his parents and is left to his own devices, with disastrous results. At first he is merely homesick, but:

Later, as his 'homesickness' became less violent and gradually passed off, this, its real character,
began to show rather more clearly. For in its place there did not come the contentment that might
have been expected; on the contrary, what it left in young Torless's soul was a void. And this
nothingness, this emptiness in himself, made him realise that it was no mere yearning that he had
lost, but something positive, a spiritual force, something that had flowered in him under the guise
of grief.

So here is this young man, his soul a void, no parental guidance to help fill the void, and he's just entered a community where he'll be surrounded by his similarly unformed peers. It just doesn't seem likely that much good can come of this situation, nor does it.

The first attachment Torless forms is with a prince from a conservative and religious family, but they become estranged. Subsequently, he experiments with mathematics, philosophy, sexual relations with the local whore, and several other pursuits, in an attempt to fill the void. But, by far, his most important relationship is with two other boys, von Reiting and Beineberg, who have decided to start psychologically, physically and sexually abusing a classmate, Basini, whom they caught stealing money. Beineberg assures Torless:

You needn't be shocked, it's not as bad as all that. First of all, as I've already explained to you,
there's no cause to consider Basini's feelings at all. Whether we decide to torment him or perhaps let
him off depends solely on whether we feel the need of the one or the other. It depends on our own
inner reasons. Have you got any? All that stuff about morality and society and the rest of it, which
you brought up before, doesn't count at all, of course. I should be sorry to think you ever believed
in it yourself. So I assume you to be indifferent.

When Torless later joins in the degradation of Basini he does so for reasons of his own, but it is the character of Beineberg--and his eagerness to exercise power over other, "lesser", beings-- that has earned the book a reputation of having forecast the rise of Nazism. But Torless does take advantage of Basini's situation and begins to exploit Basini for sexual purposes, though he tries to hide this from the other two boys. This leads to a falling out amongst the little gang and the whole sordid story is exposed.

(...)It is interesting to contrast these books with works like To Kill a Mockingbird and The Chosen which depict how difficult it is to raise children so that they are morally centered even if you keep them at home.

Beyond this obvious level, the book can be read as a statement about the general attempt to replace traditional morality. The moral decline that Torless lives out over the course of the novel essentially parallels the descent of modern man--initially cut adrift from family and religion, he passes through varying aspects of scientific rationalism, experiments with the pursuit of mere physical pleasure, and falls under the spell of Beineberg and his theory that all morality is a social construct, that each individual is free to follow his own whims. Several times over the course of the novel, Musil assures us that Torless turns out okay in later life, that after this period of youthful confusion and experimentation, he grows into a sturdier adult. One can only hope that the same will eventually be said of the species.

Musil was writing in the first full blush of Freudianism and the novel is somewhat marred by it's reliance on Freudian themes. One hundred years ago, it may have seemed daring and honest to portray a young man's sexual fantasies about his mother; today, with Freud exposed as a quack and consigned to the ash heap of history, it simply makes Torless seem more aberrant than the author intended.

Still, it's an excellent introduction to the work of a really underrated author. A Man Without Qualities, at least what I've read of it, is even better, a genuinely funny novel of Europe approaching the cataclysm of war and the destruction of the old order.

GRADE: B

A strange and compelling tale surrounding the misdeeds and sexual proclivities of four boys in a European boarding school. Published in 1906, these are indeed the "confusions" of young Torless, a character tormented by a rationalized sense of objective intellectualism and a literal cowardice in the face of tyranny.

Basini, an effeminate teen, is caught stealing by Reiting and Beineberg. These two conniving little bastards, representives of Europe's ever pervasive fascisim, decide to "punish" Basini themselves, believeing themselves to be conducting an experiment of sorts - "how far can we take this?" What follows is a series of scenes which depict the beating, sexual dominance and systematic breaking down of Basini's pysche. Throughout these events our young Torless, a mostly silent witness to the continuative events, is tortured by his own homosexual longings for the beautiful Basini. Their relationship is consummated in a very delicately rendered scene (Shaun Whiteside's translation is expert throughout). Conflicted by his sexual longings and their inherent ramifications (one must remember this behavior was considered both scandalous and ruinous), Torless betrays his lover. In an effort to disassociate himself from all three "nefarious" characters, Torless attemps to divorce himself from all comlicity in the foregoing and subsequent torture of Basini.

Musil has illustrated with great clarity the cacophony of conflicting emotions which plague most adolescent males. That Torless is confused is apparent, that his betrayal of Basini was on a much grander scale than those of his fellows is just as apprently lost on him. Perhaps a better title for this novel would have been "The Amoralist."

"The Confusions of Young Torless" (1906), by Robert Musil (1880-1942), is the poignant story of a young man who leaves his secure conservative farm home in rural Austria, for the prestige and worldlinesss of a private upper-class boys school. He settles easily into his new school, even managing to experience some grown-up pleasures with a local prostitute. He enjoys his new freedom and intellectual stimulation, finding his new environment preferable to the staid life of home, and his new friends more sophisticated than his country parents. He meets two intellectually confident boys, Beineberg, a spiritualist philosopher, and Reiting, a logicalist mathematician, both budding into youthful ideologues, both naively experimental and both youthfully extreme. Torless is drawn to their dominant personalities, and the three form a small club, meeting secretly in an attic storage room, which the rest of the school has long forgotten.

Another boy, Basini, weak-willed and rather spineless, is caught robbing. The boys have heard his mother called "Excellency" during a visit, but for some reason Basini cannot support himself financially. To find money, he borrows it from his friends, but when he cannot repay one, he borrows from another, in an endless deception. Reiting and Beineberg catch Basini at his game, and decide to blackmail him into servitude, exhibiting the casual cruelty boys so naturally inflict upon each other. Each boy tortures Basini according to his own ideology, the philosophical Beineberg trying to manipulate his soul, the mathematical Reiting trying to demonstrate universal theories of humanity. The torture is not just psychological, but also physical, and even sexual. The entire business confuses Torless at first, and shocks him further the more he sees, ultimately forcing him to take sides. Will he join the game as well, or defend Basini himself, or leave all three to their fate? Will Torless adopt the heartless exploratory endeavors of his two intellectual and stimulating friends, or will he rediscover the old-fashioned morals of his common-place parents? And where are the adults during this brutish tableau? Will Torless surrender his friends to the school's authorities, possibly fanning the flames some more? No matter what path Torless might choose, it is clear the outcome will be dramatic.

The writing itself is first-class. An educated psychologist, and an academic contemporary of Sigmund Freud, Robert Musil demonstrates great skill describing his characters and settings. The boys are drawn in perfect psychological illustrations of reality, the plot episodes effective and well-conceived, and the entire book superbly executed. Contemporary readers will recognize the same struggle in Torless that William Golding's "Lord of the Flies" would explore a half-century later (1954): How do undisciplined youth behave in the absense of guardians?

In "Lord of the Flies", after descending into deadly primitivism, the youth can only be rescued by outside forces. In "Torless", however, the choice rests upon the shoulders of Torless himself, making this drama far more compelling than Golding's. If not for a few brief sexual episodes, the book might be much more widespread among high schools than "Lord of the Flies". Nothing in "Torless" reaches even a portion of the gratuitous frankness of popular culture today, so I only hope more schools will open their eyes to this superior tale soon. The realistic school-house drama of "Torless" speaks more effectively to the modern reader than Golding's abstract fantasy island. This book can easily be recommended to anyone interested in the themes at the heart of this concise (160pp) and well-written novel: the moral struggles of adolescence, the tension of values between a "simple country upbringing" and the "sophisticated upper-class", and the ideologically destructive potential of both ill-conceived philosophy and pseudo-science.

This book was really boring. It had basically the same idea as Defoe's Robinson Crusoe, and the title, "FOE," came from Daniel DeFOE. I didn't really like Robinson Crusoe, and I thought that this book was just too much like it. It was boring, and not very fun to read. If you've already read Robinson Crusoe, don't bother reading this; there are a few differences, but it's mostly the same stuff.

First of all, I enjoyed this book. It's surreal and dreamy, and Cruso is a great character, undeserving of the scorn that has been heaped (in tiny, feckless, literary-journal-sliced rashers) upon him. Read this for Cruso, a Mersault with a moral compass of his own devising. He lives well. I would take that last, suitably rendered in the past tense, as my epitaph.

Still, the contortions that are going on here are a bit much. Coetzee is a published critic of English literature, and this novel seems to be his Shelob, a creature set down to trouble a weary age (probably not quoting my Tolkien just right). He writes that there was "No footprint" for example--well, the footprint in Robinson Crusoe is like THE most important, self-created-reality-skewing device that DeFoe employed to show Robinson's idyllic world upset by the mere hint of savagery.

Susan Barton, the main character, encounters a dead infant on her agonizing jaunt across England. The symbolism could not have been more pungent. Or more open to interpretation. Ditto the ending: cryptic enough to rattle rarefied lit-journal cages from here to 2040.

Coetzee is pretty cool, in any case. When I finish my grad courses I might read more of his stuff. Maybe if I hadn't had to read all the schlock criticism (oxymoron?), and had just picked this up, I would have been blown away.

This slim volume was beautifully written and held a rich story. I have not read Robinson Crusoe, but I knew enough about the story to enjoy this version, that is a thoroughly engaging story, but also offers existential and linguistic food for thought. The characters are written in a dream-like way; one isn't sure of their reality or hold on reality, but as the reader, I just kept wanting to know more.

I recommend this. It's lighter than Coetzee's Master of Petersburg, but it is a similar style to that book and evocative of the same emotions.

A bleak and forbidding tale about a physically disfigured man living in South Africa during a (fictional) civil war. Michael K is an outcast, yet there are some ways in which Coetzee portrays him as a Christ figure.The absence of a human father figure, the sketchy childhood prior to the events of the novel by which time he is 30, the period in the wilderness, his return signalling the drawing of (admittedly only one) disciple to him. Ultimately K is an outsider who wants to be left alone. However, society's paranoia makes it impossible for that to happen and he is condemned to live in circumstances that would kill anyone else. A sad and challenging book, worthy of the accolades accorded it.

The first thing I've read by Coetzee, and a really beautiful book. Less a "traditional" novel than a fable, it is probably not for the casual reader: it is a book of ideas, it moves slowly and requires careful reading. But it has so much to say about what it means to be human; and about man's relationship to the earth, to society, and to himself. Give it a try, and if you do, stick with it to the end. The meaning of the story reveals itself, but it goes at its own pace.

Michael K is by most people's reckoning a subnormally endowed specimen of a human being - physically and mentally handicapped, he appears to be no more than one of life's cruel failures. It is only his indomitable spirit and courage which has helped him endure constant hardship and ultimately transcend human suffering brought upon by South Africa's apartheid regime. At one level, the story seems to be about the victory of spiritual and morale courage over man's cruelty. Just as Michael's natural otherworldliness served as a protective cloak against life's slings and arrows, Coetzee seems to be telling us to take heart and emulate Michael - if such a sorry human specimen can prevail against all odds, so can we. At another level, the story seems to me to be about the independence or autonomy of the human spirit from the realities of social and political life. Through the eyes of soldiers and other conscious members of society, we see a crumbling social order and chaos everywhere. Everything touched by them is, as it were, defiled and rendered foul. Only in Michael's makebelieve world does he still find his private space and food still fit for human consumption. Coetzee's slim novel makes for compelling reading. His message is simple but powerful and uplifting.

JM Coetzee writes his South African novel with the pains of living there as the primary focus.The main characters, a disgraced college teacher in Cape Town, David Lurie (lurid?) his daughter who runs a kennel on a rural 5 hectare property, and the people that live nearby are universal; they are also representative of the changing society of a black South Africa which is slowly becoming the dominant in that society.

The human soul is at the heart of "Disgrace". Whether that soul is in need of "music" to fill the void in life, or whether it is merely a representation of all of life as it leaves one person and eventually is reborn in another, it is a theme throughout the book. The "lost" souls of David and his daughter come from disgrace; one actively gotten, one passively.

How the author tells his yarn is worth the read. The manipulative mechanisms he uses are not. Too often, the story moralizes in a not so subtle way. Rape, lechery, robbery, blackmail and land-grabbing are a bit too much for such a short novel.

Like Coetzee's other novels (Waiting for the Barbarians, Life and Times of Michael K.), Disgrace is a short yet intense study on individuals challenged by society/environment. However unlike his other novels, the story and characters in Disgrace are easily identifiable - and hence, it is perhaps the most moving novel of the lot.

Disgrace overviews the life of a disgraced university professor who, upon forced to leave his post, moves in with his estranged lesbian daughter on her rural "farm" (actually, a kennel out in the wilds of South Africa). While at the farm an incident occurs which makes the professor and his daughter re-evaluate their lives (..sorry, I really want to avoid divulging the story). The story is painfully plausible, and the complex characters and their interactions make this to be a fine read. And the modern South African setting only adds to the complexity and intrigue.

My only grumble with Disgrace is Coetzee's usage of symbolism at various points. I found such symbolism to be too obvious and utterly gratuitous. Otherwise I think most everyone over 18 would enjoy this book.

This was my first Coetzee novel, but it won't be my last. Coetzee is a splendid writer, and the book certainly deserves its Booker prize.

"Disgrace" is the story of David Lurie, the 52 year old professor of English, whom seduces one of his students. He gets caught, and partly through his own pride, he loses his job. After loosing his job, Lurie moves in with his estranged daughter who has a small farm and runs a boarding service for dogs in the countryside of South Africa. Here they experience a brutal assault, and while the grief and shame of the event should have brought them closer together, they're driven even further apart.

"Disgrace" ties together two stories: the first dealing with the difficulties of David Lurie, and the second dealing with the change in South Africa, with the end of apartheid. Coetzee's ability to link private pain to the complication of politics is excellent, and engaging.

This is a phenomenal book, timely and well written. We are introduced to a topic which those of us who are not South Africans, will probably never quite understand.

A great read!

Waiting For the Barbarians by J.M. Coetzee is a fine book, that depicts civilization at it's worst. I found the book to be boring frequently, but other parts, especially towards the end, were very thought provoking and good to read.
The book starts out with a thrilling opening, but then moves on into a dreary description of the magistrate's routine life. The beginning illustrates the empire's brutality and very appalling ways of punishment. The magistrate realizes this cruelty and this is why Coetzee then progresses onto the Magistrate's "digging" into the past and truth. When the empire is sick of the magistrate's reality check, his realization that the empire is not telling the truth perhaps, when he proceeds to take the enemy back to it's fort, that is when the book gets interesting again. The tone and image that the book creates is rather depressing, but very fascinating and truly makes a person question his or her morals. Should a person go against a mistaken society and corrupt government if that person thinks that everyone else is wrong?
The novel gives the reader a harsh and depressing picture of a corrupt Empire run by a tyrant. The book raises the question of whether or not an empire's lie to conceal the truth that could possibly ruin a civilization is permissible. In this book the Magistrate realizes that maybe the empire is not everything it is talked up to be, and that perhaps the empire's inhumane punishments are wrong and possibly over used.
This book, even though it is well written and very stimulating, is not a book for everyone, especially kids. A person who has a lot of time to think and analyze as he reads, is the person to read this 156 page book. This book is also a great book to use in an English class full of mature kids who are willing to think and discover. Another great book to read is Ender's Game by Orson Scott Card.

The novel takes place in a fictionalized setting, where the narrator is the magistrate of a remote province and wishes for nothing more than to have sex with a lot of natives and live out his life with a minimal amount of conflict (Sound familiar? Hint: read Orwell's Burmese Days, for example). He eventually he takes a stand against the Empire by trying to return a captured "barbarian" woman to her people. When he returns to his post, he finds it has been overrun by an arrogant Colonel Joll, who assumes the narrator must have been consorting with the enemy and imprisons him for treason. The narrator becomes the subject of the cruelty and torture he allowed to take place under his administration and lives out his life as a broken man. After some time, he is set free, but realizes he has nowhere to go and remains at the colony as a beggar. When the post is abandoned by the military, the poor inhabitants are left to fend for themselves against an anticipated barbarian attack.

Like Coetzee's other books, he provides a sense of depressing reality in a transformed land. As a man I wonder about his depiction of the "female" emptiness that his heroine feels, but it seems very convincing. I also wonder, as an American, what the impact of these books is on South Africans themselves. Is life this unsettled down there? The sense of despair and loneliness in this book just clings to you, and makes you appreciate your own life. Ultimately though it is life affirming.