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Inside the front cover of Coetzee's Boyhood, in the police line-up of ejaculatory blurbs -- which I tend to find outrageously embarrassing -- The Atlanta Journal-Constitution is alleged to have called the book 'a liturgy of wisdom.' (Like me, you probably have a hunch that The Atlanta Journal-Constitution was the pimply-faced geek in school who never had a date and spent his lunch hour doing geometric proofs with the head of the math department.) Newsday, meanwhile, says it's comprised of 'pithy urgent sentences from which emotion seems to explode.' (So wear your rain poncho or you'll get covered in emotion. Yuck.) Good ol' Michiko Kakutani scoured the earth for histrionic adverb-adjective combos and came up with 'fiercely revealing' and 'bluntly unsentimental.' I'd gladly agree with the latter but was sadly immune to any fierceness in this book. In fact, it was mostly fiercely perfunctory in my opinion, which, it should be noted -- in the interest of full disclosure -- is not regularly published in The New York Times and may be fiercely deficient.

I was lured into checking out those blurbs because I found myself without any strong feelings whatsoever about Boyhood, and I wanted to see what was causing its fans to get off. Sure, it's an okay, entirely palatable autobiography. (There's a blurb for you. 'Entirely palatable!' - David K.) It's not a difficult slog, by any means. But the problem is that, if, before reading, you were to imagine to yourself what an autobiography of Coetzee's childhood would be like, this is exactly the sort of thing you'd come up with. Spare, unemotional, prosaic, insightful but oddly removed.

In his allegorical novels, his detachment and clinical analysis work just fine. They actually serve the material very well. But here, where he's reflecting upon his childhood, I guess you'd hope he'd invest the telling with a little animation, a hint of passion or energy, and attempt at least to convince us that the ten-year-old Coetzee wasn't as grim and emotionally ascetic as the sixty-five-year-old Coetzee. But maybe he was a tiny Nobel laureate even then. (Fiercely unchildlike?) It probably didn't help to imbue his childhood with liveliness when he chose to write the autobiography in the third person. It keeps the whole enterprise very arm's-length and white-gloved. (As a stylistic device, the once-removed narration also makes the readers a little skeptical at the authenticity of the memoir. Is it puffed-up, over-dramatized? Of course, most autobiographies are to some extent, but it feels more conspicuous in this format.)

This makes it sound like I didn't like this book. Not true. It's just that Coetzee has kind of built up expectations for me: I want to really, really like his stuff, not just think it's okay. Plus, I probably didn't get all I could out of this thing in that it discusses the finer points of race and caste in South Africa, the history and social composition of which I know little about. The only things I know about South Africa are apartheid, Mandela, and that 'Sun City' song by Steven Van Zandt (remember that?). But these are all very vague concepts in my mind because I am (apparently) a self-obsessed American who is ignorant about the world around him. Sure, when I was splayed on the couch reading this thing, I could've gotten up and wiki'd 'South Africa' but I wasn't motivated enough, so the subtleties of Afrikans, 'Coloured People,' 'Natives,' and the English were mostly lost on me. I don't think a familiarity with these distinctions is essential to enjoying the book, but it surely couldn't hurt. And in one chapter he talks a bunch about cricket, and I was, like, 'Who cares?' I have no idea how cricket is played so I couldn't even conjure up any approximate images in my head of what Coetzee was talking about.

The format of the book is generally one of vignettes. Each chapter usually serves as a stand-alone, non-cumulative story of his childhood about one or more subjects. It's almost like an autobiographical short story collection. I think this is probably a good route for recollecting young childhood because let's face it... our memories of that time are pretty scattershot, and thus we aren't able to understand the true correlative effect of our experiences because some of them are missing or incomplete. So, all in all, the episodic nature of the book is a good strategy, but it was still a little bland.