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The Boy of La Mancha: J. M. Coetzee’s The Childhood of Jesus

The Boy of La Mancha: J. M. Coetzee’s The Childhood of Jesus URMILA SESHAGIRI The Boy of La Mancha: J. M. Coetzee’s The Childhood of Jesus J. M. Coetzee, The Childhood of Jesus. London: Harvill Secker, 2013. 277 pp. £12.99. o room at the inn: thus begins The Childhood of Jesus, J. M. Coetzee’s enigmatic novel about a forty-five- year-old man named Simo ´ n on a journey with his five-year-old charge, David. Among the astonish- ments of this story—the latest in a four-decade career devoted to narrative invention—are uncharacteristically candid expres- sions of love. A merciless chronicler of human frailty, Coetzee has until now denied love the clarity that he reserves for injustice or mortality, choking it into forms both oblique and violent. But in his latest work, a demi-allegory about the Christ-child, the unalloyed love between Simo ´ n and David announces a renewed and welcome attention to emotion from a writer whose affective gifts have been underserved by arid recent experiments such as Diary of a Bad Year (2007) and Summertime (2009). The Childhood of Jesus takes readers into an unnerving future world where alien- ation is both revealed and resolved through encounters with lit- erature. A tale suspended in medias res and bound together by serried contests http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png Contemporary Literature University of Wisconsin Press

The Boy of La Mancha: J. M. Coetzee’s The Childhood of Jesus

Seshagiri, Urmila, --
Contemporary Literature , Volume 54 (3) – Nov 25, 2013
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Publisher
University of Wisconsin Press
Copyright
Copyright © 2008 the Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin.
ISSN
1548-9949

Abstract

URMILA SESHAGIRI The Boy of La Mancha: J. M. Coetzee’s The Childhood of Jesus J. M. Coetzee, The Childhood of Jesus. London: Harvill Secker, 2013. 277 pp. £12.99. o room at the inn: thus begins The Childhood of Jesus, J. M. Coetzee’s enigmatic novel about a forty-five- year-old man named Simo ´ n on a journey with his five-year-old charge, David. Among the astonish- ments of this story—the latest in a four-decade career devoted to narrative invention—are uncharacteristically candid expres- sions of love. A merciless chronicler of human frailty, Coetzee has until now denied love the clarity that he reserves for injustice or mortality, choking it into forms both oblique and violent. But in his latest work, a demi-allegory about the Christ-child, the unalloyed love between Simo ´ n and David announces a renewed and welcome attention to emotion from a writer whose affective gifts have been underserved by arid recent experiments such as Diary of a Bad Year (2007) and Summertime (2009). The Childhood of Jesus takes readers into an unnerving future world where alien- ation is both revealed and resolved through encounters with lit- erature. A tale suspended in medias res and bound together by serried contests

Journal

Contemporary Literature – University of Wisconsin Press

Published: Nov 25, 2013

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