Reading Circle 73: ‚Boyhood‘ by J.M.Coetzee

Dienstag, den 05. März 2024:
This month we are introducing a book about childhood.

The book is ‚Boyhood, Scenes from Provincial Life‘, a fictionalized, autobiographical novel, by J.M. Coetzee, published in 1997. J.M. Coetzee is one of the most critically acclaimed and decorated authors in the English language. Born in Cape Town, South Africa, he has worked in the UK, the USA, South Africa and Australia, where he now lives. He won the Booker Prize in 1983 and 1999 and the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2003. ‚Boyhood‘ is the first of a trilogy of fictionalized memoirs, the others being ‚Youth‘ (2002) and ‚Summertime‘ (2009).

The publisher’s description of the book reads as follows: In ‘Boyhood’ J.M. Coetzee revisits South Africa of half a century ago, to write about his childhood and interior life. ‘Boyhood’’s young narrator grew up in a small country town. With a father he imitated but could not respect, and a mother he both adored and resented, he picked his way through a world that refused to explain its rules, but whose rules he knew he must obey. Steering between these contradictions, ‘Boyhood’ evokes the tensions, delights and terrors of childhood with startling, haunting immediacy. Coetzee examines his young self with the dispassionate curiosity of an explorer discovering his own early footprints, and the account of his progress is bright, hard and simply compelling.
Here are this month’s books recommended by Reading Circle members:

And they also recommended two films about childhood:

Music played: