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'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.'
'David is the small boy who is always asking questions. Simón and Inés take care of him in their new country. He is learning the language; he has begun to make friends. He has the big dog Bolívar to watch over him. But he’ll be seven soon. He should be at school. And so David is enrolled in the Academy of Dance in Estrella. It’s here, in his new golden dancing slippers, that he learns how to call down the numbers from the sky. But it’s here too that he will make troubling discoveries about what grown-ups are capable of.'
'The Schooldays of Jesus, the startling sequel to J. M. Coetzee’s widely praised The Childhood of Jesus, will beguile its readers. With the mysterious simplicity of a fable, it tells a story that raises the most direct questions about life itself.' (Source: Text Publishing website)
The Childhood of Jesus
Melbourne
:
Text Publishing
,
2013
Z1908494
2013
single work
novel
(taught in 2 units)
''The child is silent. For a while he too is silent. Then he speaks. 'Please believe me—please take it on faith—this is not a simple matter. The boy is without mother. What that means I cannot explain to you because I cannot explain it to myself. Yet I promise you, if you will simply say Yes, without forethought, without afterthought, all will become clear to you, as clear as day, or so I believe. Therefore: will you accept this child as yours?'
The Death of Jesus
Melbourne
:
Text Publishing
,
2019
17064224
2019
single work
novel
'AFTER The Childhood of Jesus and The Schooldays of Jesus, J. M. Coetzee completes his trilogy with a new masterwork, The Death of Jesus.
'David loves to kick a soccer ball with his friends in Estrella. His father, Simón, and Bolívar the dog usually watch. His mother, Inés, works in a fashion boutique.
'David still asks lots of questions. In dancing class, he dances as he chooses. He refuses to do sums and the only book he will read is Don Quixote.
'One day, Julio Fabricante, the director of a nearby orphanage, invites David and his friends to form a proper soccer team. David decides to leave Simón and Inés and live with Julio. Before long he succumbs to a mysterious illness. Will he have time to deliver his ‘message’?
'In The Death of Jesus, J. M. Coetzee continues to explore the meaning of a world brimming with questions.'
Source: Publisher's blurb.
Metaphysical Exile : On J.M. Coetzee's Jesus Fictions
Oxford
:
Oxford University Press
,
2021
22006425
2021
multi chapter work
criticism
'This is the first detailed interpretation of J. M. Coetzee’s “Jesus” trilogy as a whole. Robert Pippin treats the three “fictions” as a philosophical fable, in the tradition of Plato’s Republic, More’s Utopia, Rousseau’s Emile, or Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Everyone in the mythical land explored by Coetzee is an exile, removed from their homeland and transported to a strange new place, and they have all had most of the memories of their homeland “erased.” While also discussing the social and psychological dimensions of the fable, Pippin treats the literary aspects of the fictions as philosophical explorations of the implications of a deeper kind of spiritual homelessness, a version that characterizes late modern life itself, and he treats the theme of forgetting as a figure for modern historical amnesia and indifference to reflection and self-knowledge. So, the state of exile is interpreted as “metaphysical” as well as geographical. In the course of an interpretation of the central narrative about a young boy’s education, Pippin shows how a number of issues arise, are discussed and lived out by the characters, all in ways that also suggest the limitations of traditional philosophical treatments of themes like eros, beauty, social order, art, family, non-discursive forms of intelligibility, self-deception, and death. Pippin also offers an interpretation of the references to Jesus in the titles, and he traces and interprets the extensive inter-textuality of the fictions, the many references to the Christian Bible, Plato, Cervantes, Goethe, Kleist, Wittgenstein, and others. Throughout, the attempt is to show how the literary form of Coetzee’s fictions ought to be considered, just as literary—a form of philosophical reflection.'
Source : publisher's blurb
'The aim of this review article is to point to recent trends in Coetzee’s writings. Increasingly liberated from the pressure of conforming to codes and expectations of fictional representation, Coetzee’s recent works boldly foreground “second-order questions” (Attwell Citation2015): time and mortality, longing for affection, parenting and authenticity, non-belonging amidst rootlessness. Concerns about life “in time” in the writer’s more recent work point beyond the urge to represent historical facts with verisimilitude.' (Publication abstract)
'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)
'The first thing to be said about The Schooldays of Jesus is that like its predecessor, The Childhood of Jesus (of which it is the continuation), this new book is remarkably odd. The second thing to say is that like its precursor it is a masterpiece: it comes across as Shakespeare's Henry IV Part Two does, despite naysayers, as the second part of the same masterpiece. And who could ever have imagined that J.M. Coetzee, the celebrated South African Nobel Prize winner who expatriated himself to Adelaide as if its sandstone and the symmetrical grid of its cityscape were the recapitulation of a kindred colonialism, should now be writing what are essentially - or at any rate incidentally - parables about the lost childhood of some chosen child called David, like a teasing joke of genealogy, who is somehow (the title seems to suggest) the Messiah, the Christ Child, whose ego is the sum of all the becauses in the world, and every high priest will rip up his garments in awe either at the blasphemy of it all or because this is the apparition of the shadow of the Most High.' (Introduction)
'In the Myth of Er, told or retold by Socrates at the end of Plato’s “Republic,” we learn that after death souls are reincarnated only after crossing Lethe, the River of Oblivion. In his 2013 novel “The Childhood of Jesus” and now in its sequel, “The Schooldays of Jesus,” J.M. Coetzee has written a pair of stylistically realistic novels with, however, a Lethe premise more at home in myth. Everyone in the Spanish-speaking country where these novels are set has arrived by ship, and the voyage has washed every immigrant’s memory clean of all recollection of a previous life. Page by page, the larger portion of both novels is taken up by quasi-Platonic dialogues that struggle back toward a-Lethe-ia — Greek for “truth,” a truth left behind on the far side of Lethe. But, by a brilliant turn, the central symposiasts are Simón, a man in his 40s, and Davíd, a boy who is 5 as “Childhood” opens and 7 as “Schooldays” ends.' (Introduction)
'The first thing to be said about The Schooldays of Jesus is that like its predecessor, The Childhood of Jesus (of which it is the continuation), this new book is remarkably odd. The second thing to say is that like its precursor it is a masterpiece: it comes across as Shakespeare's Henry IV Part Two does, despite naysayers, as the second part of the same masterpiece. And who could ever have imagined that J.M. Coetzee, the celebrated South African Nobel Prize winner who expatriated himself to Adelaide as if its sandstone and the symmetrical grid of its cityscape were the recapitulation of a kindred colonialism, should now be writing what are essentially - or at any rate incidentally - parables about the lost childhood of some chosen child called David, like a teasing joke of genealogy, who is somehow (the title seems to suggest) the Messiah, the Christ Child, whose ego is the sum of all the becauses in the world, and every high priest will rip up his garments in awe either at the blasphemy of it all or because this is the apparition of the shadow of the Most High.' (Introduction)
