Coetzee and his family are Afrikaans, but he has been raised to speak English and thus is considered a minority.
He has dreams to lead a life like his favourites poets Ezra Pound, Rimbaud or Eliot but he …
Devoid of inspiration, he stops writing and begins a dark pilgrimage in which he is continually tested and continually found wanting. Coetzee says nothing and does nothing to save Eddie from the punishment, which is racially motivated, and is … John - the protagonist is a young man with aspirations to become a poet or at least a writer, graduated in mathematics and English before flying to London. ~~~~~ Amongst the more recent works of the Nobel laureate J.M. One day a young black boy named Eddie, who taught Coetzee to ride a bike, is flogged for a minor sin. In his first memoir, Boyhood (1997), Coetzee relates his early years in South Africa. He is bullied by his Afrikaaner classmates and experiences prejudice and oppression. Youth’s paramount flavour is as dual as its main protagonist’s conflicts with the world around and inside him. Coetzee has also published two memoirs, Boyhood: Scenes from Provincial Life (1997) and Youth: Scenes from Provincial Life II (2002), both written in the third person. Youth is a half-fictionalised autobiographical novel by J. M. Coetzee, a South African-born writer who left a politically unstable South Africa in 1960 and came to London.