![]() In the event, he does little more than wither into aimlessness, a self-styled 'wanderer' who, like Orwell's Gordon Comstock and Forster's Leonard Bast before him, discovers how hard it can be for a provincial with literary ambitions in the metropolis.Ĭoetzee never once leaves the young man's side, pursuing him in thought more than in action. He takes a cramped room on the Archway Road in north London, and prepares for his emotions to be 'transfigured and turned into poetry'. ![]() He wants to be a writer (what else?) and he also wants to suffer for his art. ![]() The colonial shares with Coetzee the name 'John', a background in mathematics and linguistics, and a desire to escape from 'an undistinguished, rural family, bad schooling, the Afrikaans language'. Naipaul, Dan Jacobson and many others before him. The story he tells is resonant if overfamiliar: that of a young colonial's journey, in the early 1960s, from the margins of Empire to the metropolitan centre, a journey undertaken by Orwell, V. Youth is written, as was his earlier, less artful memoir, Boyhood: Scenes From Provincial Life (1997), in an evasive third-person, so that the young Coetzee once more becomes an actor in his own drama. ![]()
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