'J. M. Coetzee’s latest novel makes for difficult reading. I have read The Schooldays of Jesus three times, and each time I pick up a new thread to follow, but am somehow unable to piece together the work’s complete meaning (if there is ‘one meaning’). On the one hand, it references both Russian and Spanish literature (Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov and Cervantes’ Don Quixote) whilst alluding to the son of God in its title, and on the other, it can be read on its own as a meditation on the concepts of passion and memory. Like in 2013’s The Childhood of Jesus, we don’t see Jesus at all and he isn’t mentioned by name. In fact, we might as well be situated in a world where Jesus doesn’t exist, as the characters’ conversations lean toward the philosophical rather than the religious. There is not the slightest mention of religion or prayer. The elusiveness of the book’s titular character leads one to an allegorical reading, rather than a literal one. What the allegory is, though, I cannot be sure. We are privy not to the childhood and schooldays of Jesus the son of God, but of a self-assured young boy named Davíd, and his parents are not Joseph and The Virgin Mary, but two strangers: the boring middle-aged Simón and the sexless, perhaps virginal, Inés.' (Introduction)
Epigraph: ‘When you travel across the ocean on a boat, all your memories are washed away and you start a completely new life. That is how it is. There is no before. There is no history. The boat docks at the harbour and we climb down the gangplank and we are plunged into the here and now. Time begins. The clock starts running…’ (17)