The Childhood of Jesus

by J. M. Coetzee

Overview

From the Nobel Prize–winning author of Waiting for the Barbarians, The Life & Times of Michael K and Disgrace. 

Nobel laureate and two-time Booker Prize winner J. M. Coetzee returns with a haunting and surprising novel about childhood and destiny that is sure to rank with his classic novels.

Separated from his mother as a passenger on a boat bound for a new land, David is a boy who is quite literally adrift. The piece of paper explaining his situation is lost, but a fellow passenger, Simón, vows to look after the boy. When the boat docks, David and Simón are issued new names, new birthdays, and virtually a whole new life.

Strangers in a strange land, knowing nothing of their surroundings, nor the language or customs, they are determined to find David’s mother. Though the boy has no memory of her, Simón is certain he will recognize her at first sight. “But after we find her,” David asks, “what are we here for?”

An eerie allegorical tale told largely through dialogue, The Childhood of Jesus is a literary feat—a novel of ideas that is also a tender, compelling narrative. Coetzee’s many fans will celebrate his return while new readers will find The Childhood of Jesus an intriguing introduction to the work of a true master.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780143125761
Publisher:	Penguin Publishing Group
Publication date:	07/29/2014
Series:	Childhood of Jesus Series , #1
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	288
Sales rank:	465,402
Product dimensions:	5.10(w) x 7.70(h) x 0.80(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

J. M. Coetzee won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2003 and is the author of twenty-one books, which have been translated into many languages. He was the first author to twice win the Booker Prize. A native of South Africa, he now lives in Adelaide, Australia.

Hometown:

Adelaide, Australia

Date of Birth:

February 9, 1940

Place of Birth:

Cape Town, South Africa

Education:

B.A., University of Cape Town, 1960; M.A., 1963; Ph.D. in Literature, University of Texas, Austin, 1969

Read an Excerpt

Chapter 1
(Continues…)

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Excerpted from "The Childhood of Jesus"
by .
Copyright © 2014 J. M. Coetzee.
Excerpted by permission of Penguin Publishing Group.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

“At once lucid and elusive….The prose is clear and flat in the special way that Coetzee has perfected.”—David Sexton, London Evening Standard (UK)

“Pure, simple prose….Vividly real.”—Sunday Express (UK)

“Beautifully put together,”—The Spectator (UK)

“The inspiring gospel according to J. M. Coetzee.”—The Herald (UK)
 

Reading Group Guide

INTRODUCTION

In The Childhood of Jesus, Nobel Laureate and two-time Booker Prize–winning J. M. Coetzee returns to the allegorical style of his acclaimed 1980 novel, Waiting for the Barbarians. A middle-aged man named Simón and a six-year-old boy named David arrive at the town of Novilla in an unspecified, Spanish-speaking country. They have come from a camp, by boat, and appear to be refugees, though from what is unclear. Strangers in a strange land, they hope to start a new life in Novilla and to find David’s mother.

Simón arrives with one unshakable conviction: that he will know the boy’s mother when he sees her—a conviction based entirely on intuition. He has never seen David’s mother, has no photographs of her, does not know her name or anything about her. Nevertheless, he has no doubts that he will recognize her.

Shortly after arriving in Novilla, Simón takes a grueling job as a stevedore, unloading the sacks of grain that will be used to make the bread on which the town relies, almost exclusively, for its nourishment—as if to refute Jesus’ assertion that man cannot live by bread alone. Indeed, Simón finds the blandness of life in Novilla exasperating. He engages in one argument after another: with his boss and fellow stevedores; with Elena, the mother of David’s friend Fidel; and virtually everyone else he meets in Novilla. His suggestion that the dock workers use a crane to liberate themselves from brute labor and allow them to do more meaningful work is met with bafflement, just as his need for sex and what Elena calls “the something-more that is missing” is dismissed as a hopeless illusion, impossible to satisfy and foolish to pursue.

While out for a walk, Simón and David encounter a woman playing tennis and Simón instantly “knows” her to be David’s mother. Though she has never seen David, Inés reluctantly agrees to take over the care of the child. Absurdity slides into reality, as Inés fully assumes the role of mother, becoming as fiercely overprotective as if she had borne and raised the child herself.

Then there is the question of David’s education, both formal and informal. At home, Simón tries to answer David’s many dogged existential questions: How are people different from “poo”? What are dead bodies? What is value? At school, David infuriates his teacher, Señor Leon, with various acts of “insubordination”: refusing (or pretending not to know how) to read or count, and disturbing his classmates. The school psychologist wants to separate David from his “parents” and place him in a special school, far from home, a plan which Inés and Simón vehemently oppose.

Novilla—the word contains echoes of villa, village, and novel—is a strange and unsettling place, or rather a no-place, a stripped-down stage set on which the characters carry out their Beckett-like philosophical debates. The inhabitants have been “washed clean” of their former lives as well as all desire for something more. They are content with things as they are, no questions asked. They are, as Simón notes, a passionless people, incapable of either irony or strong emotion. “No one swears or gets angry. No one gets drunk. No one even raises his voice” (p. 30). They do not suffer from the need for meaning, purpose, sexual and spiritual fulfillment that afflicts Simón. But have they transcended such desires or merely accepted a diminished version of full human potential?

Much in The Childhood of Jesus remains ambiguous, including the title itself. Is David a Christ figure? His “mother,” Inés, is a virgin. When his teacher tells him to write “I must tell the truth” on the blackboard, he writes “I am the truth” instead. Biblical references abound, but don’t seem to point to a coherent allegorical design. Or do they?

Coetzee’s magical and austere novel invites readers to investigate the many existential questions raised within its pages, as well as the larger question of the purpose and meaning of the novel itself.

ABOUT J. M. COETZEE

J. M. Coetzeewon the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2003 and is the author of twenty-one books, which have been translated into many languages. He was the first author to twice win the Booker Prize. A native of South Africa, he now lives in Adelaide, Australia.

DISCUSSION QUESTIONS

1. What kind of world does Coetzee create in Novilla? What is the atmosphere of the town? What rules govern the thoughts and behavior of its inhabitants? Why do Simón and David have such a hard time fitting in?
2. In a 2003 interview with David Attwell, Coetzee said, “I do not treat the creation of fiction, that is to say the invention and development of fantasies, as a form of abstract thought. I don’t wish to deny the uses of the intellect, but sometimes one has the intuition that the intellect by itself will lead one nowhere.” In what ways does The Childhood of Jesus develop a tension between fact and fantasy, intellect and intuition, order and chaos?
3. When David’s teacher, Señor Leon, tells him to write on the blackboard, “I must tell the truth,” David writes instead, “I am the truth” (p. 225). What other significant Biblical references appear in the novel? Is David a Christ figure?
4. David offers to help Simón unplug the toilet by suggesting that he can give him ideas. Simón replies, “alas, toilets are not receptive to ideas. Toilets are not part of the realm of ideas, they are just brute things, and working with them is nothing but brute work.” Simón also explains death to David by saying that dead bodies have to stay behind but that there is an afterlife. “We are not like poo, that has to stay behind and be mixed again with the earth. . . . We are like ideas. Ideas never die” (p. 133). Is Coetzee being serious or playful here? Or serious and playful at the same time? Can The Childhood of Jesus be read as a comic novel? What other moments of deadpan philosophical absurdity occur in the novel?
5. David is repeatedly described as gifted and he himself feels possessed of magical powers—to breathe life back into the dead, to make himself invisible, et cetera. How are we to regard David? Is he special? Or simply a spoiled and willful child? Is his defiance of Señor Leon an admirable refusal to be socialized into a deadening conformity or is he simply being obstinate?
6. The inhabitants of Novilla have no burning desires and seem to live contented lives. Their diet is bland, consisting mostly of bread and soup, and their entertainments are few. Simón’s fellow stevedores are puzzled by his desire to do more “meaningful” work. Similarly, Elena suggests that Simón’s passions are foolish and destructive. “This endless dissatisfaction,” she says, “this yearning for the something-more that is missing, is a way of thinking we are well rid of, in my opinion. Nothing is missing. The nothing that you think is missing is an illusion. You are living by an illusion” (p. 63). Would Simón be happier if he could accept Elena’s rather Buddhist perspective? Or would that be surrendering to a vacuous animal-like existence? Does the novel itself seem to endorse one view over the other?
7. Elena chastises Simón for giving David to Inés, a woman he knows nothing about. “Investigating her qualifications as a mother was not necessary, you said: you could rely on intuition. . . . Intuition: what sort of basis is that for deciding a child’s future?” David replies, “What is wrong with native intuition? What else is there we can trust, finally?” To which Elena answers, “Common sense. Reason. Any reasonable person would have warned you that a thirty-year-old virgin used to a life of idleness, insulated from the real world, guarded by two thuggish brothers, would not make a reliable mother” (p. 104-105). Does Simón make a mistake in giving David to Inés? Why is Simón so sure that she is David’s mother? Does Inés turn out to be a bad mother? How does she treat David?
8. Simón references Voltaire’s satirical novella Candide when he tells his boss Alvero, who misses the irony, that “all is for the best in this best of all possible worlds” (p. 41).Is Coetzee, in his depiction of Novilla, satirizing a particular way of life? A particular way of thinking?
9. Most contemporary fiction is realistic and relatively straightforward. What are the pleasures and challenges of reading an elusive book like The Childhood of Jesus?
10. Simón tells Eugenio, “There are two schools of thought, Eugenio, on the upbringing of children. One says that we should shape them like clay, forming them into virtuous citizens. The other says that we are children only once, that a happy childhood is the foundation of a happy later life. Inés belongs to the latter school; and, because she is his mother, because the bonds between a child and his mother are sacred, I follow her” (p. 251). In what ways is the novel not just about a particular childhood but childhood itself—what it means to be and to become a human being?
11. At the end of the novel, Simón, Inés, David, the dog, Bolívar, and the hitchhiker Juan set off for Estrellita, where they hope to start a new life. Will their lives there likely be a repetition of their experience in Novilla, or does the novel point to a genuine new beginning for them?

Editorial Reviews

[The Childhood of Jesus] plunges us at once into a mysterious and dreamlike terrain….A Kafka-inspired parable of the quest for meaning itself.”—Joyce Carol Oates, The New York Times Book Review (front page)

"[A book] of profound and painful humanity, preoccupied with some of the most essential questions about what it means to be a parent and what happens when noble principles are confronted with the grubby details of everyday life."—Patrick Flanery, The Washington Post

“Gripping from the very first page.”—Bookforum

“A return to form….[Coetzee’s] most brisk and dazzling book.”—Benjamin Lytal, The Daily Beast

“Compelling—eerie, tautly written.”—Los Angeles Times

“[Coetzee] is a consummate withholder, one of the great masters of the unsaid and the inexplicit.”—The New York Review of Books

“The Childhood of Jesus—this cryptic, mythic, haunting fable—ranks among J. M. Coetzee’s best.”—The Chicago Tribune

“With this powerful and puzzling novel, Nobel laureate Coetzee…returns to the allegorical focus that defined Waiting for the Barbarians.”—Booklist (starred)

“Captivating and provocative….Coetzee’s precise prose is at once rich and austere, lean and textured, deceptively straightforward and yet expansive, as he considers what is required, not just of the body, but by the heart.”—Publishers Weekly (starred review)

“A fictional form that is as provocative as it is readable.”—Star Tribune

From the Publisher

In this captivating and provocative new novel, a small boy who has been renamed David, and Simón, the man who has become David’s caretaker since David was separated from his mother, have immigrated to a nameless country. Simón soon finds work on the docks, is given an apartment for new arrivals, and sets about the impossible task of finding David’s mother, whose name they do not know and whose face the boy does not remember. One day, Simón glimpses a woman inside a wealthy household—a woman who very likely isn’t David’s mother—and becomes instantly, illogically convinced that she should raise the child. He approaches her intent on convincing her to be “a mother” to David; what unfolds is their story: mistakes made in the name of love and choices no one would wish to encounter. Most fascinating is the timeless, almost placeless country itself, which provides the immigrants with essentials–food, shelter, education, and modest employment–but denies them what Simón discovers matters most: irony, sensuality, intensity, and opinion. At times, the questions driving the allegory become almost too explicit, as when Simón asks a woman with whom he has just done the disappointing “business of sex” if “the price we pay for this new life, the price of forgetting, may be too high?” As in the past, Coetzee’s (Disgrace) precise prose is at once rich and austere, lean and textured, deceptively straightforward and yet expansive, as he considers what is required, not just of the body, but by the heart. Agent: Rema Dilanyan, Peter Lampack Agency. (Sept.)

Publishers Weekly

In this puzzling story, a man and a boy arrive by boat at an unknown destination, not unlike New York's Ellis Island, where they are given new names and birth dates. Because the five-year-old, now called David, has been separated from his mother on the boat, Simón takes responsibility for him. In this Spanish-speaking country, David and Simón struggle to adapt. Spare shelter is provided, and Simón finds work as a stevedore hauling sacks of grain. He teaches the precocious David to read using the allegorical story of Don Quixote to explain the worth of both logic and imagination, but when he finds a young woman to mother David, the two tangle regarding how to proceed with the youngster's education. The simplicity of Coetzee's prose belies the complexity of this Orwellian tale about a place where memory is denied, passion neutralized, and life is whittled down to its bare essentials. VERDICT Published in the UK in March to mixed reviews, Nobel Prize laureate and Booker Prize winner Coetzee's latest novel will be highly anticipated in the States. The dystopian themes may attract new readers, and students will have much to discuss, but fans of his more potent novels (e.g., Disgrace) may find this effort disappointingly flat. [See Prepub Alert, 3/18/13.]—Sally Bissell, formerly with Lee Cty. Lib. Syst., Ft. Myers, FL

Library Journal

Nobel Prize winner Coetzee delivers a deliberately paced and enigmatic novel about a strange child and his surrogate mother and father. In a scene reminiscent of Kafka's The Castle, Coetzee's narrative opens with the arrival of an old man named Simón and his young traveling companion, David, at a resettlement center where everything is slightly awry and off pitch--there's no key to the room they're supposed to go to, for example, the woman in Building C is not ready for their arrival, and there's no formal mechanism in place to help them get settled. We learn that they've been at "the camp" and now hope to start a new life, but owing to some missing paperwork, David has become separated from his mother, so Simón vows to help him reunite with her. All he knows is that he will intuitively recognize her as David's mother when he sees her. At first, David is more preoccupied with his hunger than with anything else, but then he meets Fidel, a young boy, and his mother, Elena, a violin teacher with whom Simón has occasional casual sex. Meanwhile, Simón has gotten a job unlading boats, demanding work made somewhat lighter by the philosophical discussions he has with Álvaro, his boss. Simon also meets Inés, a woman who he's certain is David's mother, and even though there's much ambiguity about this relationship, she begins to fulfill a motherly role, almost overly so, for she becomes overbearing and bullying. This is an unconventional novel indeed, with inscrutable characters wandering through a bleak and tenebrous world.

Kirkus Reviews