num_pages: 176
description: The second installment of J. M. Coetzee's fictionalized "memoir" explores a young man's struggle to experience life to its full intensity and transform it into art. The narrator of Youth has long been plotting an escape-from the stifling love of his overbearing mother, a father whose failures haunt him, and what he is sure is an impending revolution in his native country of South Africa. Arriving at last in London in the 1960s, however, he finds neither poetry nor romance and instead begins a dark pilgrimage into adulthood. Youth is a remarkable portrait of a consciousness, isolated and adrift, turning in on itself, of a young man struggling to find his way in the world, written with tenderness and a fierce clarity.
language: English
title: Youth
titlecomplete: Youth
characters: John Coetzee
genres: Nobel Prize, Africa, South Africa, Literary Fiction, Novels, 21st Century, Literature, Fiction, African Literature, Contemporary
ratings_count: 7518
places: Cape Town, South Africa, London, England
series: Scenes from Provincial Life
publisher: Penguin Books