Youth

J. M. Coetzee

2002

June, 2025

10/10

“His sole talent is for misery, dull, honest misery. If this city offers no reward for misery, what is he doing here?”

There’s something so raw and touching in the most human of ways that allows the book to leave an incredibly beautiful impression. The drifting wanderlust, the hiding of the poetic self, the yearning for connection (albeit through often deviant means). In a word, the book is human; in two: profound.

Any reader should start with Boyhood for proper background. I also suggest first reading Stoner and Suicide. Altogether, these books form a painting of raw humanity in modern(ish) times.

Throughout the story is the desire to engage in the artistic world while fighting against the need to work:

"He wants to join Rothamsted, wants to find a use for the mathematics he has laboured over for years, but he also wants to go to poetry readings, meet writers and painters, have love affairs. How can he ever make the people at Rothamsted – men in tweed jackets smoking pipes, women with stringy hair and owlish glasses – understand that? How can he bring out words like love, poetry before them? Yet how can he turn the offer down?"

There's a fire within him, a passion he is well aware of, yearning for escape. I feel like there's really no point in elaborating on these themes myself when Coetzee expresses it all so well in his writing:

"He is in England, in London; he has a job, a proper job, better than mere teaching, for which he is being paid a salary. He has escaped South Africa. Everything is going well, he has attained his first goal, he ought to be happy. In fact, as the weeks pass, he finds himself more and more miserable. He has attacks of panic, which he beats off with difficulty. In the office there is nothing to rest the eye on but flat metallic surfaces. Under the shadowless glare of the neon lighting, he feels his very soul to be under attack. The building, a featureless block of concrete and glass, seems to give off a gas, odourless, colourless, that finds its way into his blood and numbs him. IBM, he can swear, is killing him, turning him into a zombie. Yet he cannot give up."

I also enjoyed the idea of John finding "peace" in the reading room. One the one hand, it provides him the space, both mental and physical, to work on his own interests. On the other, it forces him to sit with his longings and loneliness:

"The life of the mind, he thinks to himself: is that what we have dedicated ourselves to, I and these other lonely wanderers in the bowels of the British Museum? Will there be a reward for us one day? Will our solitariness lift, or is the life of the mind its own reward?"

It's something that never goes away and comes up again and again as a wall between himself and other people:

"In real life all that he can do well, it appears, is be miserable. In misery he is still top of the class. There seems to be no limit to the misery he can attract to himself and endure. Even as he plods around the cold streets of this alien city, heading nowhere, just walking to tire himself out, so that when he gets back to his room he will at least be able to sleep, he does not sense within himself the slightest disposition to crack under the weight of misery. Misery is his element. He is at home in misery like a fish in water. If misery were to be abolished, he would not know what to do with himself."

When he is shown kindness by others — when others attempt at bringing him into their world — he is left incapable of handling the situation. An invitation for a meal, for example, ultimately leaves him in existential dread:

"There must be some gesture to make, some simple act of reciprocation, but he cannot find it, or else will not, and it is fast becoming too late anyway. What is wrong with him? Why does he make the most ordinary things so hard for himself? If the answer is that it is his nature, what is the good of having a nature like that? Why not change his nature?

But is it his nature? He doubts that. It does not feel like nature, it feels like a sickness, a moral sickness: meanness, poverty of spirit, no different in its essence from his coldness with women. Can one make art out of a sickness like that? And if one can, what does that say about art?"

It's very important to note the connection between his feelings/statements of misery and his desire to turn this into art:

"He cannot sacrifice any more of his life to the principle that human beings should have to labour in misery for their bread... Usually he does not know his own mind, does not care to know his own mind. To know one’s own mind too well spells, in his view, the death of the creative spark... He must leave IBM. He must get out, no matter how much it will cost in humiliation."

He continually puts himself down while wallowing. His consistent attitude is that his wallowing begets art — art that will somehow make up for the holes in who he is as a person:

"[S]o, he suspects, the intended one will have to know him by his works, to fall in love with his art before she will be so foolish as to fall in love with him."

Never once does he stop repeating these ideas, wondering who he is and what he's doing while justifying his misery as artistic inspiration:

"There is only one shadow. A year has passed since he last wrote a line of poetry. What has happened to him? Is it true that art comes only out of misery? Must he become miserable again in order to write? Does there not also exist a poetry of ecstasy, even a poetry of lunchtime cricket as a form of ecstasy? Does it matter where poetry finds its impetus as long as it is poetry?"

Around this point in the book, he meets Ganapathy. For me, Ganapathy was the most important character in the story: the quintessential representation of a societal product. He is a successful man by the modern world's standards, yet the lack of humanity John so desperately endures in his own story is what leaves Ganapathy (a man without art to lean on) alone, wasting away in a room filled with garbage:

"And what is the upshot of this lack of heat, this lack of heart? The upshot is that he is sitting alone on a Sunday afternoon in an upstairs room in a house in the depths of the Berkshire countryside, with crows cawing in the fields and a grey mist hanging overhead, playing chess with himself, growing old, waiting for evening to fall so that he can with a good conscience fry his sausages and bread for supper. At eighteen he might have been a poet. Now he is not a poet, not a writer, not an artist. He is a computer programmer, a twenty-four-year-old computer programmer in a world in which there are no thirty-year-old computer programmers. At thirty one is too old to be a programmer: one turns oneself into something else – some kind of businessman – or one shoots oneself. It is only because he is young, because the neurons in his brain are still firing more or less infallibly, that he has a toehold in the British computer industry, in British society, in Britain itself. He and Ganapathy are two sides of the same coin: Ganapathy starving not because he is cut off from Mother India but because he doesn’t eat properly, because despite his M.Sc. in computer science he doesn’t know about vitamins and minerals and amino acids; and he locked into an attenuating endgame, playing himself, with each move, further into a corner and into defeat. One of these days the ambulance men will call at Ganapathy’s flat and bring him out on a stretcher with a sheet over his face. When they have fetched Ganapathy they might as well come and fetch him too."

Again, Coetzee's quotes speak for themselves. There is little more I could add. The final point I will make is that by the book's conclusion, John never even finished the thesis he had been working on throughout his entire journey. In fact, he wrote only computer programs. The book is a masterpiece on introspection and helplessness in a world that couldn't care less about who we are as individuals.

An argument could be made that John simply never tried to be artist, that he never gave it a genuine effort. My own argument would be that the world never afforded him the chance. He got caught in a modern struggle between passion to live and necessity to survive. Yes, he could have put more effort into his art, but the point the book is making is that finding one's place in the world should not be this difficult and painful; the world should not be structured such that anyone is left entirely alone.