Boyhood. Scenes of a Provincial Life

J.M. Coetzee

Penguin, USA (September 1998)

166 pg.

Review by Maria Andrade

Boyhood is the first of J.M. Coetzee’s series of three autobiographical novels, which includes Youth: Scenes of a Provincial Life and Summertime. The novel centers on the early experiences of a boy growing up in Worcester, a town in South Africa. The back cover of the Penguin edition of the book includes a commentary from the Washington Post that characterizes the book as “charmingly accessible.” I disagree with the characterization; Coetzee can hardly be described as a charming writer, by any stretch of the imagination. I would describe this work as perplexing, insightful, stark, and many other adjectives better suited to the cold and incisive observation of life and its paradoxes, and, in this case, of his own remembered past. Boyhood is narrated in the third person, in a laconic style that conveys an underlying tension, and often hints at brutality. The author’s observation of himself as a fictionalized child reveals feelings and emotions that are experienced as dark, confusing and unacceptable at the time, and the narrative does not explain them away, but rather, as is characteristic of Coetzee, they are allowed to remain without any redeeming explanation. 
From the initial pages of the book —which begins with the unsettling description of the sickly chickens that his mother keeps in a coop in the backyard of their home and the account of how she kills them— the guiding thread of the narrative is the child’s feeling of shame. Shame is a feeling associated with his relationship toward the mother, who is at once adored and despised, and who occupies a central place in the book. This shame is connected also with the boy’s feelings towards her body, which both fascinates and repels him, and his ambivalence is expressed in the way in which he joins the father, whom he despises, in ridiculing her. Shame is also apparent in his confused feelings toward school, where he feels mortified for being a good student who is not beaten by the teachers, as all the “normal” boys are. Instead of feeling proud of himself, the boy wants to hide the fact that he has never deserved physical punishment and he is humiliated by the knowledge that cowardice and fear of pain are the secret causes of his good grades. As a sort of “basso continuo,” the feeling shame accompanies the boy in various episodes of his life. He feels his inadequacy as he visits the farm on his mother’s side of the family, as he realizes that, in spite of his love for the place, he does not truly belong there. He feels excluded by his Afrikaner origin, which, on the one hand, he sees as unsophisticated and peasant-like, and on the other, he seems to admire. Simultaneously, he knows that, even if his family life is conducted in English, he is not truly English either. Shame is also the underlying tone of his confused perception of the inequality and injustice of the apartheid culture that he inhabits, and of the unjustified privileges that he has on account of being white.
There are some humorous episodes in the novel.  At one point, the reader is informed that the child has secretly “become a Roman Catholic,” but the narrative soon reveals that this alleged conversion is only the result of a confusion and misunderstanding, and that now the child has been placed among a marginal, pariah group in school. But overall, the tone is sparse, curt, and even somber. These recollections of a childhood in South Africa are not nostalgic, but rather, they lend themselves to a critical reading of the society they portray.