Home | Books By Year | Books from 2002


Youth: Scenes from Provincial Life II

Buy Youth: Scenes from Provincial Life II now from Amazon

First, read the Wikipedia article. Then, scroll down to see what other TopShelfReviews readers thought about the book. And once you've experienced the book, tell everyone what you thought about it.

Wikipedia article




'Youth' (or 'Youth: Scenes from Provincial Life II') (2002) is a semi-fictionalised autobiographical novel by J. M. Coetzee, recounting his struggles in 1960s London after fleeing the political unrest of Cape Town.

Plot summary



The story begins with the narrator living in Mowbray and studying at the University of Cape Town. After graduating in mathematics and English and in the wake of the Sharpeville massacre he moves to London in the hope of finding inspiration of becoming a poet and finding the woman of his dreams. However he finds none of this and instead, takes up a tedious job as a computer programmer working for IBM his work including checking punched cards submitted to an IBM 7090 for the TSR-2 project . He seeks refuge in the Third Programme and cinema, falling in love with Monica Vitti. He feels alienated from the natives and never settles down, always aware of the scorn they see him with. He engages in a series of affairs, none of them fulfilling to him in the slightest. He scorns people's inabilities to see through his dull exterior into the 'flame' inside him; none of the women he meets evokes in him the passion that, according to him, would allow his artistry to flourish and thus produce great poetry. By the end of the book he is working for International Computers on the Atlas project.


Buy Youth: Scenes from Provincial Life II now from Amazon

<-- Return to books from 2002



This work is released under CC-BY-SA. Some or all of this content attributed to http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?oldid=1093939917.