The Schooldays of Jesus
Description
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.
Davíd is the small boy who is always asking questions. Simón and Inés take care of him in their new town Estrella. 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 and he should be at school. And so, Davíd is enrolled in the Academy of Dance. 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. In this mesmerising allegorical tale, Coetzee deftly grapples with the big questions of growing up, of what it means to be a parent, the constant battle between intellect and emotion, and how we choose to live our lives.
About this Author
J.M. Coetzee is a professor of general literature at the University of Cape Town. His many awards include the Booker Prize, twice, for The Life & Times of Michael K in 1983 and for Disgrace in 1999. He is a two-time Booker Prize winner, has also won the CNA prize, South Africa's premier literary award (three times), the Prix Etranger Femina, the Jerusalem Prize, the Lannan Literary Award and the Irish Times International Fiction Prize.
Reviews
Compelling, often very funny, full of sudden depths--Observer
Brilliant...tenaciously absorbing--Daily Telegraph
It is written with the coolness and limpidity that makes Coetzee a master... There were moments where I found it almost too affecting to read--David Sexton, Evening Standard
It's compulsively enigmatic but surprisingly funny too.--Metro
Coetzee doesn't want to be understood, or explained. He wants, merely, to be read. The Schooldays of Jesus is, indeed, very readable--The Times
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