The Childhood of Jesus

The Childhood of Jesus is a 2013 novel by South African-born Australian Nobel laureate J. M. Coetzee.^[1]

Synopsis

The book follows a man and a boy who

The book was published simultaneously on 7 March 2013, by Jonathan Cape (UK) and Text Publishing (Australia).^[2] The U.S. edition was published on 3 September 2013, by Viking.^{[citation needed]} It was also published in Spanish translation, partly because it relates to Coetzee's interest in Argentine literature and resisting what he calls the "hegemony of the English language".^[3]

Reception

Early reception for the book was positive, with Tim Adams of The Observer believing it to be "an early contender for an unprecedented third Booker prize".^[4] The Australian also praised The Childhood of Jesus, stating that it was "a masterpiece".^[5]

Theo Tait, writing in

Upon its U.S. publication, David Ulin, the Los Angeles Times book critic, said it "ultimately falls prey to the emptiness it describes. Partly, this has to do with its meandering quality; in a land without history, even those who seek not to forget must lose sight of the past. But even more, the issue is the distance in Coetzee's writing, the feeling that his characters are less living flesh-and-blood than signifiers of some idea. When his novels are working (as in Life and Times of Michael K. or the magnificent Waiting for the Barbarians), Coetzee's ideas are big enough to seize us, to give us a new set of lenses on the world. With The Childhood of Jesus, however, the allegory never extends beyond itself, beyond the image of a small group of wanderers, adrift in an uncharted universe, "looking for somewhere to stay".^[7]

Anthony Uhlmann, in the Sydney Review of Books, discussed ways in which the novel could be understood as part of a dialogue with the works of Gerald Murnane.^[8]

References