Word: boyhoods
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...Boyhood is unusual not only in style, but in motive as well. While most writers of memoirs blame their parents for turning them into screw-ups, Coetzee takes a decidely unconventional turn. The young Coetzee resents his privilege. At school, he is the model student, finishing first in all his classes without a semblance of strain. At home, he is "an irascible despot," displacing his ineffectual father as the household's center of attention: "He has never worked out the position of his father in the household. In fact, it is not obvious to him by what right his father...
...Boyhood is written in the third person, an unusual perspective for a memoir. Unfortunately, this stylistic gimmick doesn't prove as unsettling or provocative as it promises. Boyhood's narrator, unlike those of other third-person memoirs (such as the Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas by Gertrude Stein, Class of 1898), never develops a personality distinct from Coetzee's. The third-person voice just allows Coetzee to avoid intimacy with the reader, to talk around himself without adopting a confessional tone...
...best-written chapters in Boyhood treat the pastoral, not political, aspects of South African life. Coetzee lavishes description on Voelfontein, the Coetzee family farm. The young Coetzee, who feels estranged by Worcester society, "must go to the farm becasue there is no place on earth he loves more or can imagine loving more." In his eyes, the farm is a kind of Eden from which he and his parents have been expelled, destined forever after to eke out a living in dusty provincial towns...
Considering all his childhood idols--cricket players, Russian tank drivers, school teachers--it's difficult to imagine why the grown-up Coetzee decided to write for a living. We keep expecting some pivotal moment in Boyhood that never arrives, an epiphany in which the adolescent boy realizes he is destined to write. After all, isn't the author of a memoir, especially if he's a distinguished author, supposed to explain how he came to set pen to paper in the first place? The young Coetzee, while fond of books and learning, does not seem particularly driven to his present...
...only episode in Boyhood that might pass for an explanation comes in the final two lines: "How will he keep them all in his head, all the books, all the people, all the stories? And if he does not remember them, who will?" Why God has chosen the 13-year-old Coetzee as designated rememberer is desparately unclear. It's a lame ending to a memoir that skirts, but never directly probes, the author's inner life...