Bookbot

Scènes de la vie provinciale Séries

Cette série plonge dans le monde intérieur de l'enfance et la formation de l'identité dans un paysage austère et isolé. En suivant le parcours d'un garçon sensible et intelligent, ces œuvres explorent les complexités des liens familiaux et des pressions sociétales. La représentation authentique de l'enfance dans une Afrique du Sud multiculturelle mais tendue offre des aperçus profonds sur le développement personnel et psychologique.

Scenes from Provincial Life
Summertime
Youth
Scènes de la vie d'un jeune garçon

Ordre de lecture recommandé

  1. Scènes de la vie d'un jeune garçon

    • 192pages
    • 7 heures de lecture

    Depuis la parution en 1982 de ses œuvres saluées, John Michael Coetzee a toujours montré une réticence à sortir de l'ombre. Pour la première fois, il revisite l'Afrique du Sud d'il y a cinquante ans, à la recherche de la fraîcheur et de la spontanéité de son enfance. Cette évocation autobiographique plonge dans les hantises et les secrets d'un enfant brillant à l'école, mais despote et irascible à la maison, qui se cherche entre un père qu'il méprise et une mère dont il craint de perdre l'amour. Il navigue entre deux cultures et deux langues, pressentant un monde troublant. Dans cette période de sa vie, qu'il faut "endurer en grinçant les dents", il découvre l'autre - Afrikaner, Anglais, métis, noir, juif - ainsi que les préjugés et injustices qui les entourent. Il perçoit le mystère du sadisme et du désir. Déjà, il sait que ce qu'il écrira sera plus sombre, quelque chose qui, une fois coulé sur la page, se répandra comme de l'encre renversée, évoquant des ombres dans l'eau calme et des éclairs zébrant le ciel.

    Scènes de la vie d'un jeune garçon1
    3,8

  2. Youth

    • 169pages
    • 6 heures de lecture

    A searing portrait of a young colonial in early 1960s London – from the two-time winner of the Booker Prize. Set against the background of the 1960s - Sharpeville, the Cuban missile crisis, Vietnam – Youth is a remarkable portrait of a consciousness, isolated and adrift, turning in on itself. The narrator of Youth, a student in the South Africa of the 1950s, studies mathematics, reads poetry, saves money, trying to ensure that when he escapes to the real world, wherever that may be, he will be prepared to experience life to its full intensity and transform it into art. Arriving in London, however, he finds neither poetry nor romance. Instead he succumbs to the monotony of life as a computer programmer, from which random, loveless affairs offer no relief. Devoid of inspiration, he stops writing. An awkward colonial, a constitutional outsider, he begins a dark pilgrimage in which he is continually tested and continually found wanting.

    Youth2
    3,8

  3. Summertime

    • 272pages
    • 10 heures de lecture

    Summertime is an inventive and inspired work of fiction that allows J.M. Coetzee to imagine his own life with a critical and unsparing eye, revealing painful moral struggles and attempts to come to grips with what it means to care for another human being.A young English biographer is researching a book about the late South African writer John Coetzee, focusing on Coetzee in his thirties, at a time when he was living in a rundown cottage in the Cape Town suburbs with his widowed father - a time, the biographer is convinced, when Coetzee was finding himself as a writer. Never having met the man himself, the biographer interviews five people who knew Coetzee well, including a married woman with whom he had an affair, his cousin Margot, and a Brazilian dancer whose daughter took English lessons with him. These accounts add up to an image of an awkward, reserved, and bookish young man who finds it hard to make meaningful connections with the people around him. Summertime is an inventive and inspired work of fiction that allows J.M. Coetzee to imagine his own life with a critical and unsparing eye, revealing painful moral struggles and attempts to come to grips with what it means to care for another human being. Incisive, elegant, and often surprisingly funny, Summertime is a compelling work by one of today's most esteemed writers.

    Summertime3
    3,8

Dans le même esprit

  • Scenes from Provincial Life

    • 496pages
    • 18 heures de lecture

    Coetzee's majestic trilogy of fictionalised memoir, Boyhood, Youth and SummertimeIt opens in a small town in the South Africa of the 1940s. As he interviews important figures in Coetzee's life, a portrait emerges of an awkward outsider who - even after death - remains dogged by rumours.

    Scenes from Provincial Life
    3,8