The book cover of the student days of Jesus.
In 2003, Coetzee, the Nobel Prize in Literature laureate, published his new novel The Schooldays of Jesus in the UK in August this year.
Nobel Prize in Literature winner Coetzee.
This novel is the sequel to his last work, The Childhood of Jesus. In The Childhood of Jesus, Simon, an old man, took David, a boy, from a refugee camp in the desert to Novella, a Spanish-speaking city. They lost their memories, and even their surnames were taken by others. Simon took David to find his birth mother. Finally, the three of them completely despaired of the orderly but passionate Novella and left it for the next city, Estella.
The story of "The Schooldays of Jesus" begins here. Simon and Yi Ni take David to Estella. They work on a farm, and David soon enters the local dance academy. This is a mystical dance academy, which "devotes itself to guiding students’ souls to the sky, so that souls can fit in with the movement of the great universe-or dance". David quickly learned to express "noble numbers from the planet" with dance, and met Dmitry, a museum security guard. Dmitri fell madly in love with the dance teacher Madeleine, and finally killed her.
Like its prequel, The Times of Students attracted many readers’ complaints: "English translation like Spanish", "environmental description like IKEA" and "too few social details to make the characters stereoscopic".
Its plot is not always convincing: in Jesus’ Childhood, Simon, who promised to find David’s biological mother, confirmed that she was David’s mother when she first met Yinis, and she undoubtedly accepted and formed a family with them; David, a boy, is suspiciously precocious. In the book, he speaks amazingly and makes remarks such as "I am the truth".
As a reader, I feel that time passes slowly in a mysterious world where my memory is banished. When faced with a novel that lacks reading pleasure, it is easy for us to have rejection ("this is a terrible writing") or self-doubt ("I must be too stupid to read his profound meaning"), but there may be another way, that is, to try to understand the writer-what kind of person is Coetzee? What’s he thinking?
First of all, Kutcher is very cold.
Thin, tall, silver hair, a pair of thoughtful, slightly narrowed eyes. Look at him, and then look at Marquez-thick eyebrows, big hands, Mario-like grin-and you can immediately feel the temperature difference between them.
This critic James Wood once said, and also found evidence in Coetzee’s memoir Youth published in 2002:
"If he is a more enthusiastic person, he will undoubtedly find it easier to do all this: life, love and poetry."
Coetzee does not belong to the mural writer with dense brushwork, but his past language can never be considered dry:
"ninety minutes a week with a woman is enough to make him feel happy, which makes him feel very strange, because he always thought he needed a wife, a home and marriage. In fact, his needs are very light, light and short-lived, just like the needs of butterflies. There is no emotional impulse, or only the deepest and most difficult feeling to guess: a most basic sense of satisfaction, like the buzz from the road urging the city people to sleep gradually, and like the silence that makes the country people sleep at night. " ("shame")
In the two works of Jesus series, the temperature of his character dialogue plummeted and he has retreated to the outline style:
"He and Yinis exchanged glances. Should they follow Juan’s advice? Money is not a problem. He has a lot of money in his pocket. It is not a problem for them to stay in a hotel. But officials in Novella are chasing them, and maybe they are safer among the unknown temporary residents.
Yes,’ said Yinis. Let’s live on this farm. We’ve been locked in the car long enough. Poliva needs to run.’
I think so,’ Simon said. However, the farm is not a place for a holiday. Are you ready, Yinis, to pick fruit in the hot sun every day?’
I’ll try my best,’ said Yinis. Neither more nor less.’
Can I pick fruit?’ The boy asked.
I’m sorry, you can’t,’ Juan said. This is illegal. This is child labor.’
I don’t mind working as a child.’ The boy said. "
Is this language style an imitation of the Bible? The plot of Jesus series is intertextual with the Bible. If the precocious David represents Jesus, then Simon and Yinis seem to represent Joseph and Mary respectively. The story follows a sacred family in exile in the empty text land, and the reader seems to vaguely understand that this is Coetzee creating his own gospel. In recent years, he has become more and more close to religion, and the self-analysis of his past works, which is almost cruel, seems to indicate this.
In the novel "Bad Age", the protagonist is highly coincident with Coetzee, who is also an elderly South American writer living in Australia. He recalls that his father once thought he was a selfish child, and his art lacked "generosity, no praise for life and no love"; In his memoir "Youth", he confessed his appearance defects, his mental life moaning without illness, and his emptiness after passion-honesty has always been Coetzee’s virtue, but it is always separated by a layer: "Youth" is a memoir, but Coetzee chose the third person.
This is certainly not the first time Coetzee has expressed his views in a roundabout way.
He hardly gives interviews to the media, does not attend the Booker Prize ceremony, and even if he gives a Nobel Prize in Literature Prize-winning speech, he still chooses to tell an obscure and tortuous story.
He likes to make a confession by fictional doppelganger: in Elizabeth Costello: Eight Classes, Coetzee teaches animal life, African humanities, evil problems and sexual desires through his female avatar Elizabeth. He speaks freely and at the same time excuses himself from his speech, which sometimes makes people wonder whether that remark was Coetzee’s opinion or just that of a fictional character.
"Summer" is even bolder. Coetzee directly "murdered" himself, and let the biographer Vincent build a multifaceted and even unbearable self by interviewing the late writer "Coetzee" in the eyes of others … Coetzee, like a deeply poisoned Russian doll, kept adding brackets, brackets and brackets to the narrative until the brackets themselves became an inseparable part of the narrative.
Since Shame in 1999, Coetzee began to try to "nonfiction" the novel, and created a series of memoirs, essays and biographies that are difficult to distinguish between true and false. Now, in Jesus series, he has returned to his most familiar allegorical writing again. However, this time, the allegory is not as strongly insinuating the injustice and hypocrisy of the South American colonies as Waiting for the Barbarian and Michael K’s Life and Times in his early years.
In Childhood of Jesus and Student Life of Jesus, Simon or David talked with porters, government officials and dance teachers and expressed their views on various grand themes: passion, lust, power, order and shame … It sounds like Plato’s tone, but it is not as clear and meticulous as the Republic.
Simon once had a lover in Novella. When he sought passion from other women, the lover said:
"This endless dissatisfaction, this desire for’ more’, this way of thinking has long been eliminated, I think. Nothing is missing. What you think is missing is an illusion. You are living by illusion. "
Such a speech embellishes the whole story. There are many reasons, but the taste is very weak. Coetzee doesn’t seem to care whether this dialogue is credible or far-fetched, because it is a fable, and readers who have concluded a trust treaty with the writer should believe the rationality of the story, even if the writer doesn’t provide enough perceptual details, social details and emotional details like Bunyan’s description of pilgrim’s progress or Dante’s description of hell. However, I have to say that it is too difficult to fish with a hook without a sharp hook.
David and his party lost all their memories before they came to Novella, which may be a hint from Coetzee: readers who open this book should also wash away their memories of the real world and enter this uncomfortable place unarmed. For Coetzee, who has always been metaphysical, a "real and sensible world" may not be his interest; In other words, what he wants to extract through the novel is another kind of truth.
In 2012, Coetzee gave a speech to the graduates of the University of Witwatersrand in South Africa for the first time. He made a puzzling appeal to the male students among the graduates, hoping that they could devote themselves to the cause of primary education, because "as far as what we call the’ real world’ job is concerned, one of the boring facts is that when you sell things to others, buy things from others, or fiddle with numbers on the computer screen all day, you will have a feeling of being hard to get rid of.
If you work with children, I promise you will never feel this way. Children may be tiring and annoying, but they are complete human beings. In the classroom, you can experience a sense of nakedness that you can’t experience in the world where adults work. "
Only children are complete people, and only the children’s world has not been whitewashed to appear sincere-Coetzee, who said this, sounded like a pessimistic believer and had no hope for the adult world.
Coetzee was not the only writer who turned his back on the real world and built the fable Lego. Kafka wrote Castle, kazuo ishiguro wrote No Comfort, and Beckett, which Coetzee loved … These works were all books that refused to bring pleasure to reading: the reader followed the protagonist to an unknown world, his wishes and expectations were constantly frustrated, and doubts and repression accumulated like a snowball … Coetzee added a sigh to this little nightmare showroom.
