The Childhood of Jesus, by J. M. Coetzee

Rumor has it that J. M. Coetzee, winner of the 2003 Nobel Prize in Literature, wanted the reader to discover the title of this book after reading it, but the conventions of book publishing would not allow that. I thought of this rumor often as I read this strange, allegorical book and wondered what difference not knowing the title would have made.

Simón, a middle-aged man, arrives in Novilla by boat with a boy named David in his care. Novilla is a vaguely utopian city or a vaguely dystopian one, depending on how you look at it. Everything is neat and orderly and the people are well cared for, but the place is also passionless. Simón and David go about constructing a new life in this world. They find a place to live, Simón finds work, and Simón attempts to find David’s mother, without any real clues to go on. He simply believes that he will know her when he sees her. He settles on a woman named Inés, a “virgin slate,” and hands David unceremoniously into her care. But he finds that he loves the boy, so after a lot of trial and error, he, Inés, and David form a sort of family.

This plot is narrated so aridly that we get little feeling for the place or the characters. Yes, Coetzee’s prose is masterfully precise and spare, as many have said, but in this case, it is also airy. Instead of writing economically in order to weight words with greater emotion and meaning, he somehow manages to evacuate all feeling from the language.