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8 out of 8 found this helpful: The Immigrant Writer's Life
Review: Youth
 
A few months prior to reading "Youth" I read Coetzee's famed novel about white people's redemption in South Africa, "Disgrace", I was slighly taken back by the grimness of his subjects. Then my sister recommended that I read this book, an autobiography about the author's immigrant life in London in his early twenties, as grim and gray as Coetzee's tone is, it was a delight to read, probably because it echos our own lives in so many aspects. The whole book was told in third person and the author never once mentioned his own name, which makes it sounds like a calm and unaffected retrospect. Coetzee has wanted to be a poet since entering college, but his poetry never taken flight, instead, it is in the fluid language of his prose that one sees poetry.
I cannot help comparing Coetzee's novels with our own immigrant writer Ha Jin, who too choose to cut off his tie from his native country, yet write mostly about the struggles and lives of people who remain there. For me both authors' perspectives are so detached that their credibility is in doubt. At the end of the day, Coetzee won my appreciation because of his language. This comparision is certainly unfair because English is almost Coetzee's native tounge. Maybe we should review Vladmir Nabakov's prose for the best example of an immigrant writer.
Coetzee has done a great job in retelling an honest account of a young artist's thoughts and struggles, even the characters we all so despise in young artists, such as vainity (not of appearance but of his artistic instincts), extremely bad social skills, low respects for women, and being out of touch with reality. If anything, the young Coetzee could have been quite an annoying kid. Somehow the fact that he did not write this book in a remorseful or critical way makes it more interesting, as if the character (Coetzee himself) is still developing while we read the book.
Armed with all the common fallacies of an artist, at that time Coetzee's only real claim to art is perhaps his avid readings, and his on-going graduate studies in literature. Here's the part I like the best, he makes a living by being a programming at IBM. The scenario is so familiar it made me grin, a fresh graduate living in a foreign city all by himself, trying to find inspirations, and maybe someone to ignite the fire inside him, he is sensitive to all the indignities a inexperienced foreig...... full review
2005-12-14 13:32 | 7 comments
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