Scenes From Provincial Life - J. M. Coetzee [0]
Praise for the trilogy
BOYHOOD
This life is described with such skill, such exactitude and such relentlessness that I found myself gasping for air … Coetzee has achieved something universal in his work … a fine book, probably the best description of a childhood I have ever read.
– The Times
YOUTH
A memorable picture of the harshness London can offer to incomers … Youth is a wonderful book: a Bildungs roman, or portrait of the artist as a young man, to rank with any in the canon.
– Evening Standard
Certainly, no writer I have encountered has captured so vividly the paralysing sense of deracination that seized many of us when we found ourselves cast up on a shore that proved far more alien and hostile than our fantasies and ambitions had led us to imagine.
– The Sydney Morning Herald
SUMMERTIME
This is the third instalment of a life so reserved, so repressed, so seething with polite rage and restrained despair that it could only be approached through a third-person voice it is wonderful stuff. But then, Coetzee is wonderful: edgy, black, remorselessly human, witty, and often outright funny.’
– Irish Times
Here in Summertime, passion exceeds argument. Here for a moment she [the reviewer] answers as a reader not with her head but with her heart.
– Australian Literary Review
As the [fictional] biography unfolds, the picture that emerges is devastatingly honest, charming, at times funny, but always self-critical. The book is not too cool or too neat. It is a stunning achievement by a man at the height of his powers.
– The Courier-Mail
Summertime is an exhilarating read. Like being played with by a magnificent lion whose paws sometimes caress but at other times the muscle and the claw send you spinning. The sly joke is that this lion puts the idea into his text that he, the writer, is inconsequential. Here is a paradox: a man such as this can write words that touch readers at the deepest level.
– The Age
Summertime is both an elegant request that the sum of Coetzee’s existence as a public figure should be looked for only in his writing, and ample evidence, once again, why that request should be honoured.
– The Guardian
Rich offerings as an imaginatively distorted and distorting portrait of the artist as outsider.
– Times Literary Supplement
The writing is luminous, revealing intellectual and emotional subtlety of a very high order.
– The Sydney Morning Herald
Also by J.M. Coetzee
Dusklands
In the Heart of the Country
Waiting for the Barbarians
Life & Times of Michael K
Foe
White Writing
Age of Iron
Doubling the Point: Essays and Interviews
The Master of Petersburg
Giving Offense
Boyhood
The Lives of Animals
Disgrace
Stranger Shores: Essays 1986–1999
Youth
Elizabeth Costello
Slow Man
Inner Workings
Diary of a Bad Year
Summertime
In memoriam D.K.C.
Author’s note
The three parts of Scenes from Provincial Life have appeared before as Boyhood (1997), Youth (2002), and Summertime (2009). They have been revised for republication.
I would like to express my thanks to Marilia Bandeira for assistance with Brazilian Portuguese, and to the estate of Samuel Beckett for permission to quote (in fact to misquote) from Waiting for Godot.
Contents
Cover
About the Author
Praise
Also by J.M. Coetzee
Title Page
Dedication
Author’s note
Boyhood
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Youth
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six