''The Childhood of Jesus'' is a 2013 novel by

South Africa South Africa, officially the Republic of South Africa (RSA), is the southernmost country in Africa. It is bounded to the south by of coastline that stretch along the South Atlantic and Indian Oceans; to the north by the neighbouring countri ...

n-born Nobel laureate

J. M. Coetzee John Maxwell Coetzee OMG (born 9 February 1940) is a South African–Australian novelist, essayist, linguist, translator and recipient of the 2003 Nobel Prize in Literature. He is one of the most critically acclaimed and decorated authors in ...

. The book was published simultaneously on 7 March 2013, by

Jonathan Cape Jonathan Cape is a London publishing firm founded in 1921 by Herbert Jonathan Cape, who was head of the firm until his death in 1960. Cape and his business partner Wren Howard set up the publishing house in 1921. They established a reputation ...

(UK) and

Text Publishing Text Publishing is an independent Australian publisher of fiction and non-fiction, based in Melbourne, Victoria (Australia), Victoria. Company background Text Media was founded in Melbourne in 1990 by Diana Gribble and Eric Beecher, along wit ...

(Australia). The U.S. edition was published on 3 September 2013, by

Viking Vikings ; non, víkingr is the modern name given to seafaring people originally from Scandinavia (present-day Denmark, Norway and Sweden), who from the late 8th to the late 11th centuries raided, pirated, traded and se ...

Synopsis

The book follows a man and a boy who

immigrate Immigration is the international movement of people to a destination country of which they are not natives or where they do not possess citizenship in order to settle as permanent residents or naturalized citizens. Commuters, tourists, and ...

to a new land. Once there, they receive new names and rough estimates of their age and are taught

Spanish Spanish might refer to: * Items from or related to Spain: **Spaniards are a nation and ethnic group indigenous to Spain **Spanish language, spoken in Spain and many Latin American countries **Spanish cuisine Other places * Spanish, Ontario, Cana ...

in an attempt to acclimate them to their new surroundings. Simón, the elder of the two, begins working at a grain wharf and slowly befriends his fellow workers. At the same time, Simón must find a way to locate the mother of the young boy David, who remembers nothing about her but assumes that he will recognize her when he sees her. During a walk, David attaches himself to a woman he believes to be his mother, prompting Simón to successfully talk her into assuming the role. However, while she begins to care for David, the authorities insist that he be sent to a distant school. Refusing to give him up, Simón and the woman flee in hopes of outrunning their pursuers and retaining custody of David.

Reception

Early reception for the book was positive, with Tim Adams of ''

The Observer ''The Observer'' is a British newspaper published on Sundays. It is a sister paper to ''The Guardian'' and ''The Guardian Weekly'', whose parent company Guardian Media Group Limited acquired it in 1993. First published in 1791, it is the w ...

'' believing it to be "an early contender for an unprecedented third Booker prize". ''

The Australian ''The Australian'', with its Saturday edition, ''The Weekend Australian'', is a broadsheet newspaper published by News Corp Australia since 14 July 1964.Bruns, Axel. "3.1. The active audience: Transforming journalism from gatekeeping to gatew ...

'' also praised ''The Childhood of Jesus'', stating that it was "a masterpiece". Theo Tait, writing in ''

The Guardian ''The Guardian'' is a British daily newspaper. It was founded in 1821 as ''The Manchester Guardian'', and changed its name in 1959. Along with its sister papers ''The Observer'' and ''The Guardian Weekly'', ''The Guardian'' is part of the Gu ...

'', said that ''The Childhood of Jesus'' was "richly enigmatic, with regular flashes of Coetzee's piercing intelligence" and compared the book to the rest of what he termed Coetzee's "admirable but forbidding canon". Tait wrote, "Personally, I would put ''The Childhood of Jesus'' some distance behind his conspicuous masterpieces, such as '' Life & Times of Michael K'', ''

Waiting for the Barbarians ''Waiting for the Barbarians'' is a novel by the South African writer J. M. Coetzee. First published in 1980, it was chosen by Penguin for its series '' Great Books of the 20th Century'' and won both the James Tait Black Memorial Prize and Geo ...

'' and ''

Disgrace ''Disgrace'' is a novel by J. M. Coetzee, published in 1999. It won the Booker Prize. The writer was also awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature four years after its publication. Plot David Lurie is a white South African professor of English wh ...

'', and also behind the wonderful autobiographical trilogy that ended with '' Summertime''". Nevertheless, said Tait, ''The Childhood of Jesus'' "probably belongs in the strange-but-interesting section, with his Crusoe story '' Foe'' and ''

Elizabeth Costello '' Elizabeth Costello'' is a 2003 novel by South African-born Nobel Laureate J. M. Coetzee. In this novel, Elizabeth Costello, a celebrated aging Australian writer, travels around the world and gives lectures on topics including the lives of ...

''. Upon its U.S. publication, David Ulin, the ''

Los Angeles Times The ''Los Angeles Times'' (abbreviated as ''LA Times'') is a daily newspaper that started publishing in Los Angeles in 1881. Based in the LA-adjacent suburb of El Segundo since 2018, it is the sixth-largest newspaper by circulation in the Un ...

'' 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 ''

''), 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". 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 Gerald Murnane (born 25 February 1939) is an Australian writer, perhaps best known for his novel ''The Plains'' (1982). ''The New York Times'', in a big feature published on 27 March 2018, called him "the greatest living English-language writer ...

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Childhood of Jesus, The 2013 South African novels Novels by J. M. Coetzee Jonathan Cape books Novelistic portrayals of Jesus