The Schooldays of Jesus

by J. M. Coetzee Narrated by James Cameron Stewart

Overview

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, with the guidance of the three sisters who own the farm where Simón and Inés work, 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 mesmerizing 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.

Editorial Reviews

The New York Times Book Review - Jack Miles

…Coetzee…create[s] a kind of fusion genre blending the energy of philosophical dialogue, the warmth and unprogrammed humor of father-son repartee, the emotional potency of a family romance and finally the uncanny suggestion of allegory (womb as ship, birth as disembarkation). The result is rich, dense, often amusing and, above all, full of inner tension and suspense.

Publishers Weekly

11/21/2016
The temperature rises ever so slightly in Nobel winner Coetzee’s (The Childhood of Jesus) latest, the second installment of his wintry gospel that beguiles as often as it numbs. Coetzee’s fable continues as Símon—stolid, devoted—and Inés—reticent, passionless—have taken their ward, Davíd, and fled Novilla, the stultifying socialist city whose nightlife (which consists of philosophical lectures) is as flavorless as its dietary staple (bean paste). The nontraditional family begins yet another new life, now in a provincial town (in an unspecified country), Estrella, in “the year of the census.” Davíd, the “magistral” child whose true name remains a mystery, enrolls in a dance academy whose instructors espouse mystical notions about embodied Platonic forms: “To bring the numbers down from where they reside, to allow them to manifest themselves in our midst, to give them body, we rely on the dance.” Símon initially views this as “harmless nonsense,” an attitude that widens the gulf between him and his inquisitive charge. He responds to Davíd’s ceaseless questions with “dry little homilies” that seldom satisfy the otherworldly child. These Socratic sallies can grate rather than illuminate, and the novel’s Biblical allusions can seem more coy than revelatory. In The Childhood of Jesus, Don Quixote’s visionary gusto inspired young Davíd; here, there are darker, Dostoyevskian drives at play. Davíd is attracted to exuberant characters who, unlike his guardians, flout conventional morality. Enter Dmitri, a museum attendant infatuated with Davíd’s ethereally beautiful dance instructor, to provide a welcome, and violent, jolt of immeasurable passion to the novel’s measured world. (Feb.)

From the Publisher

[The Schooldays of Jesus is] a kind of fusion genre blending the energy of philosophical dialogue, the warmth and unprogrammed humor of father-son repartee, the emotional potency of a family romance and finally the uncanny suggestion of allegory (womb as ship, birth as disembarkation). The result is rich, dense, often amusing and, above all, full of inner tension and suspense.”—New York Times Book Review

“Freed from literary convention, Coetzee writes not to provide answers, but to ask great questions.” —The Economist

“The Schooldays of Jesus is a powerful novel that steamrolls through the reader’s mind with many striking ideas and beliefs. Propelled by the battle between two different philosophies, the philosophy of the higher realm of passion and fantasy and the philosophy of the orderly, measurable world of rationality, The Schooldays of Jesus explores a striking quest for meaning.”—New York Journal of Books

“Coetzee has an impeccable ear for the tender patter between a curious child and a conscientious father figure who never wants to lose his patience . . . There’s no denying the haunting quality of Coetzee’s measured prose, his ability to suspend ordinary events in a world just a few degrees away from our own." —The Washington Post

“Coetzee delivers a beautiful sequel in The Schooldays of Jesus . . . They are tender, supple works written by a man who engages with the world in a range of moods: from the serious political and ethical thrust of his South African novels to the artistically playful temper of his late style . . . pure poetry.”—Charleston Post and Courier

“Many scenes have the qualities of miniature Socratic dialogues. Their pleasures are pure, as Coetzee has cleared away modern prejudices and stripped his characters’ philosophical conversations to a skeletal core . . . there’s a stark beauty to these novels of ideas and the haunting images that infuse them: a young boy pondering a bird with a broken wing, a beautiful woman turned blue by death, an old man trying to dance.” —New York Magazine

“As compelling, and confounding, as its predecessor.” —Booklist (starred)

Praise for J.M. Coetzee and The Childhood of Jesus

“[The Childhood of Jesus] plunges us at once into a mysterious and dreamlike terrain. . . . A Kafka-inspired parable of the quest for meaning itself.” —Joyce Carol Oates, The New York Times Book Review (front page)

“A return to form . . . [Coetzee’s] most brisk and dazzling book.” —Benjamin Lytal, The Daily Beast

“Compelling—eerie, tautly written.” —Los Angeles Times

“[Coetzee] is a consummate withholder, one of the great masters of the unsaid and the inexplicit.” —The New York Review of Books

“Gripping from the very first page.” —Bookforum

“[Coetzee’s] great talent has always been to make the reader . . . feel as though he is writing for her alone, challenging her to ask herself the same questions he puts to his characters. . . . The Childhood of Jesus . . . explores the enduring question of what a just and compassionate world might look like.” —The Nation

“[Coetzee] uses his icy, pitch-perfect prose to create a mysterious, Kafkaesque world. . . . . Utterly enigmatic.” —Mother Jones (Best Books of 2013)

“[The Childhood of Jesus] is the story of a boy named Davíd. . . . His character is both uniquely and universally profound. In one moment, he is like no child to have ever existed. In the next moment, he captures perfectly the essence of all children, everywhere.” —The Atlantic (Best Books Read This Year)

“The Childhood of Jesus—this cryptic, mythic, haunting fable—ranks among J. M. Coetzee’s best.” —Chicago Tribune

“Captivating and provocative . . . Coetzee’s precise prose is at once rich and austere, lean and textured, deceptively straightforward and yet expansive, as he considers what is required, not just of the body, but by the heart.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review)

Library Journal - Audio

05/01/2017
Simon and Ines are struggling to raise six-year-old David in a way that encourages his free thinking but also allows him to keep pace with other children his age. After disastrous attempts at traditional schooling and tutoring, they are not sure what to do. When the owners of the farm they are working on offer to pay David's tuition at the Academy of Dance, these parents gratefully accept. The academy is a mystical, philosophical school where children call down the numbers from the heavens by dancing them. When the instructor is brutally murdered by her lover, David discovers the body and Simon tries to help him deal with the aftereffects. Coetzee's allegorical story is full of bizarre characters who seem to have no notion of how to deal with small children or one another. Coetzee makes no attempt to explain the story's setting, leaving the listener to interpret what it means when characters have their memories "wiped clean" or make vague religious and philosophical references alluding to the loss of technology or animal species. James Cameron Stewart's narration is very stiff, making it difficult for the listener to tell one character from another. VERDICT The poor narration and Coetzee's ambiguous plot and ending result in a confusing and difficult-to-understand surrealism that may perplex listeners to the point of frustration. ["Only those who enjoy philosophical conundrums will want to take a look": LJ 1/17 review of the Viking hc.]—Terry Ann Lawler, Phoenix P.L.

Library Journal

01/01/2017
Passion vs. rationalism. Romanticism vs. pragmatism. Idealism vs. realism. These are the core issues in Nobel Prize winner Coetzee's novel, a sequel to The Childhood of Jesus. In a world where people arrive by boat, where they are given new names after their memories have been erased, Simón, Inés and a boy named David come together by happenstance. The child possesses some special talents, it seems, but his greatest satisfaction comes from manipulating the people around him. Now of school age, he first attends a traditional school, but after constantly pushing the limits he is asked to leave. David then attends the Academy of Dance, where he flourishes, but complexities abound. The life of the academy involves mysticism, sexuality, and violence—all of which result in belabored philosophical questions regarding idealogy and the "stars between the stars." Within a "false utopia" such as this, finding analogies to the life of Jesus is a mind-bending and frustrating task. Is it the author's intention to tell a story, or does he want readers to walk a labyrinth that has no end? VERDICT Only those who enjoy philosophical conundrums will want to take a look. [See Prepub Alert, 8/26/16.]—Susanne Wells, Indianapolis P.L.

Kirkus Reviews

2016-12-07
Coetzee continues the allegorical musings he began in The Childhood of Jesus with this sequel, which is equally elliptical, sparse, and vexing. Davíd is now 6, going on 7, and preternaturally precocious. He asks "why" questions that his usually imperturbable father-figure, Simón, finds profound but unanswerable—and Davíd seems to be making little attempt to comprehend Simón's measured responses. Davíd's mother, Inés, the object of Simón and Davíd's quest in Coetzee's previous novel, is preoccupied with Davíd's education, for the three of them have run away from Novilla (in the unnamed country they inhabit) and fled to Estrella, where they hope to find a new life. Eventually Simón and Inés enroll Davíd in an academy of dance, where he comes under the mystical sway of instructor Ana Magdalena Arroyo, who believes dancing is connected to numbers in the stars. Meanwhile, Ana Magdalena is "worshiped" by the creepy Dmitri, an attendant at a local museum. All of this is vaguely symbolic, vaguely irritating, and, unfortunately, only vaguely interesting. Coetzee's characters seem a bit bloodless and unreal, as though they're floating through a dream world in a parallel universe only tenuously connected to ours. Although Coetzee deals in big themes (repentance, guilt, shame, lust), these qualities remain curiously abstract rather than attached to flesh-and-blood characters—perhaps appropriate in such an opaquely allegorical work. Coetzee is a master of the laconic style here, but there's a quirkiness in his writing (for example, the repetition of "He, Simón..." ad infinitum) that the reader might ultimately find irksome. A novel only for those who want to update their reading of the Nobel Prize-winning Coetzee.

Longlisted for the 2016 Man Booker Prize

Product Details

BN ID:	2940170128747
Publisher:	HighBridge Company
Publication date:	02/21/2017
Edition description:	Unabridged

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