A remarkable, searing portrait of a young colonial in early 1960s London, his first novel since winning the Booker Prize for the second time with Disgrace.
J. M. Coetzee's work includes Dusklands, In the Heart of the Country, which won the premier South African literary award, the CNA Prize, Waiting for the Barbarians, which was awarded the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize, the James Tait Black Memorial Prize and the CNA Prize, Life and Times of Michael K, which won the Booker Prize and the Prix Etranger F-mina, Foe, Age of Iron, which won the Sunday Express Book of the Year Award, The Master of Petersburg, which won the Irish Times International Fiction Award and the memoir Boyhood- Scenes from Provincial Life. His most recent novel, Disgrace, won the Booker Prize, making on eof only two authors to have won it twice.
A remarkable, searing portrait of a young colonial in early 1960s London, his first novel since winning the Booker Prize for the second time with Disgrace.
A remarkable, searing portrait of a young colonial in early 1960s London, his first novel since winning the Booker Prize for the second time with Disgrace.
Picking up where his memoir Boyhood left off, Coetzee chronicles his coming of age in South Africa and London during the 1960s. Writing in the third person, Coetzee narrates the story of a young mathematics student named John who is hungry for excitement, adventure, and mystery. Increasingly dissatisfied with his inability to suck life's marrow in his native South Africa and also afraid of being conscripted into the army, John runs off to London to seek his fortune. He finds a job as a computer programmer, but his heart's great desire is to burn with the inner flame of the artist, so he spends his spare time writing poetry (he worships Ezra Pound) and searching in London bookshops for poetry journals. Along the way, he assuages his loneliness with sexual affairs, only to become lonelier when he realizes that he cannot offer these women a clue to the darkness that lies inside him. D.H. Lawrence meets Alan Paton in Coetzee's sometimes brilliant, sometimes tedious account of his sexual exploits, revolutionary fervor, and artistic evolution. This second memoir by the author of Waiting for the Barbarians and other popular novels is recommended for all libraries. [Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 31502.] Henry L. Carrigan Jr., Lancaster, PA Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information.
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