Too Much for One Book
Nobel laureate J.M. Czoetzee's "The Childhood of Jesus" came out in 2013 as a cryptic fable exploring innocence, destiny, diaspora, maternal love and the philosophy of the abyss that is human affection. And it's the kind that polarises the reading population. It's difficult to have a neutral opinion about this book.
The story begins with a heavy vibe of organised chaos. It takes about the first five chapters to reach any stable information about the characters, time and setting. In fact, only at the end of the three hundred and eighteen paged book did I realise that I had read it with the wrong approach. The book is meant to have almost no plot, because it is so cinematic and philosophical. It's a compelling and confounding work of political philosophy wrapped in a less compelling, even seemingly intentionally flat, work of fiction, one that falls somewhere between episodic and unadvancing. The world Coetzee describes isn't real; the main characters have no relation to each other; their quest is implausible.
An elderly man and a boy (neither of their ages or actual names is mentioned) have made a journey to some nondescript socialist city of Novilla on a boat, which is where they met. Both the man and the child have no family and pass through a rehabilitation border where they are given new identities. The man takes it up as his responsibility to look for the boy's mother. And the search is solely based on intuition, since there is absolutely no information about the boy's mother. This search develops new relationships and experiences, and the reader sees the contrasting worlds of an aged man and a child from their individual perspectives. And this search for identity reflects the general human search for meaning. The boy is sent to a school where he has trouble fitting in and so falls into the threat of being sent to a boarding school for difficult children. It is decided that they must move to a new place or the social welfare authorities would compel the child to live away from his guardians at the school. The story ends full circle with the two main characters, along with the new friends they have acquired throughout the journey, driving to a new relocation centre for another change of identity, as the man says, "Looking for somewhere to stay, to start our new life."
Personally, I found this book odd and digressing in the beginning, but couldn't pull away, and by the end, it actually left a very pleasant aftertaste. The New York Times called it a "Kafka-inspired parable of the quest for meaning itself." Most of this South African-born Australian author's work is surrealistic and needs to be read with an open-minded approach and frankly, patience, because things can get very confusing when there are only hints of the time and location at which the story is taking place. But somehow the lack of informational depth is more than compensated by the philosophical weight of the story and the people in it. It's not a coffee table book; I'd recommend it if you're into metaphysics and abstract art.
Aysha Amin's life is a struggle of meeting the unrealistically high goals she sets for herself while being too lazy to ever do anything. Contact her (she likes to be sent Hungryalist poetry and harsh criticism) at [email protected]
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