Coetzee's Boyhood Photographs
- New York Review of Books
On January 11, on a sweltering summer afternoon in Cape Town, J.M. Coetzee gave a rare public reading in the home town he left, somewhat precipitously, fifteen years ago to take up an academic post in Adelaide, South Australia. The reading took place at the Irma Stern Museum in the city’s southern suburbs, currently hosting an exhibition of arresting Coetzee juvenilia: “Photographs from Boyhood,” a recently discovered trove that the author took in the mid-Fifties when he was a schoolboy growing up in these suburbs. In his wry and unsparing way, Coetzee projected a series of these images onto a screen and read related extracts from his 1997 fictionalized memoir Boyhood (he calls the genre “autre-biography,” because it always involves making an artifact of one’s life for an “other”).