Photo: Marahau, nothing to do with J.M. Coetzee, but this pretty, well-fed, and plump California quail caught my eye.

Coetzee, J.M. Youth, Secker & Warburg, London, 2002.

I mention in passing that I got myself an e-reader for two reasons: the first is that I have little space at home to store books, Ihave to put them in storage; the second, and perhaps more importantly, is that it gives me access to books in French (ordering books from New Zealand is far too pricy). I didn’t hesitate to read Coetzee in French, even though he is very clear and accessible in his original language. After reading his autobiography about his younger years in South Africa (Boyhood), I wanted to know more about this Afrikaner author, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature and the Booker Prize, among many other prestigious awards, and now lives in Australia. I found it fascinating to be able to observe, through his words, what was going on in the mind of the young man who would become one of the great authors of our time. This is in no way a hagiography. Rather, we meet a young man who wants first and foremost to escape South Africa to become a poet, because he believes that his talent will only flourish when he lives in a metropolis such as London or Paris (he does not feel fluent enough in French to go to Paris), where he will be able to gain life experiences similar to the artists he admires. These artists he idolizes don’t marry, they have many muses, they don’t pay their rent, they drink and are charismatic, everything that the young Coetzee is not. He abhors alcohol, smoking, finds it immoral not to pay one’s debts, he is very clumsy in his social interactions at work and the women he meets don’t find anything special about him. To earn a living and be able to stay in London, he has to work, and it is at IBM (later for a British computer company), mainly because of his mathematical skills), a work completely opposite to what he dreams of becoming. Soon enough, he is disappointed to realise that London does not accomplish the poetic transformation he had hoped for. He leaves his first job but is forced to go back to work in the same field to pay his bills. Against all expectations, he also realises that South Africa, which he so wanted to escape is still a part of him. He is doing a master’s degree in literature without much conviction, he feels like he is going nowhere and as he progresses towards the conclusion of this chapter of his life, he wonders if you have to be a bad guy to be an artist and if so, is it better to be an artist and bad, or a good person who is not an artist? All this questioning is very revealing of the individual that we can easily guess, only by looking at photos of him, introverted and very unsociable. Coetzee does not spare himself, does not try in any way to embellish his personality and we even suspect that he enjoys drawing a pathetic portrait of himself. The good news is that although he does not possess the clichéd qualities associated with artists, and even if he did not become a poet, he became one of the great novelists of his time. On the translation side, I wonder why « Youth » was translated as « Vers l’âge d’homme » and I sometimes wondered what the French translation I was reading was phrased in English, but I nevertheless enjoyed the French version. I will soon delve into the third part of his autobiography, « Summertime ».