The Childhood of Jesus

The Childhood of Jesus by JM Coetzee, reviewed in The Australian:

Questions have always been a crucial part of Coetzee’s rhetorical strategy. It is the postmodern author’s version of the rising intonation used by the young to turn all discourse into a mode of scepticism regarding grand or absolute claims. In these pages a tissue of claim and counterclaim rehearses perplexities – arising from clashes between the personal and the social, the beautiful and the good, animal existence and the examined life – that have appeared elsewhere in Coetzee’s work, but never before held in such perfect tension.

The novel is a monument to moral symmetry, a cathedral of balanced cards.

It would be wrong to conclude that Coetzee interrupts the course of the narrative to pose such conundrums. Rather, they inhere in the story’s progress. As Simon and David attempt to establish a life for themselves, then set out to discover the whereabouts of David’s mother, such abstractions intermingle with the tale Coetzee has to tell. Philosophy, for the author, is something that emerges organically; it is bred from character and action rather than bare intellection, and it is all the more powerful for it.

The temptation, when faced with a book as conceptually rich and as brilliantly wrought as The Childhood of Jesus, is to describe it as a masterpiece. That would be to succumb to a hazy reverence of a kind antithetical to the author’s project. Nowhere since Disgrace have the architectural structure of Coetzee’s fiction, the import and music of his words, been so reverberantly interlinked. Yet Coetzee’s work insists that a too easy submission to myths of romantic creativity is religious mania transposed on to a profane realm.

You Might Also Like:

More from Conversational Reading:

1. Jesus Coyote by Harold Jaffe While reading the capsule reviews in the RCF, this one caught my eye. Sounds interesting: Beginning with a pair of lurid Tate/LaBianca massacre headlines, mining...
2. Mallarmé as Jesus Without comment. As Meillassoux summarizes it, Un Coup de Dés centers on the aftermath of a shipwreck, which leaves a mysterious “Master” with one seemingly...
3. JM Coetzee: A Life in Writing This one sounds very interesting. I hope someone decides to publish this Stateside soon, or at least figures out some way to sell it here...
4. A Matter of Character This weekend in the NYTBR, Lee Siegel tells us: By the 1950′s, here and in Western Europe, it was making less and less sense to...
5. Gerald Murnane’s World Very nice to see one of my favorite writers and critics, JM Coetzee, tackling one of my favorite discoveries of 2012, Gerald Murnane, in the...

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.