50p. Local farm bookshelves. All that.
Now, I would buy pretty much anything written by Coetzee
(and pretty much anything that sells for 50p for that matter) so I couldn’t
resist the temptation to buy Youth, but,
objectively, this is just a very well-written story of (what was then a) fairly
average young man trying to find his way in big and scary London. Sure, Coetzee
writes impeccably, and the sections of the story set in the IT company at the
outskirts of London have got the traits of a bizarre coming-of-age story (his
nerdy colleague who can’t feed himself
is probably the best part here), but that’s about it.
All in all, its literary weight is probably inferior to that
of Orwell’s Keep the Aspidistra Flying
(which I found just about bearable a few months ago), but since I love Coetzee
and I don’t really love Orwell, I’ll try to not say this too loudly…
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