The Schooldays of Jesus

Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

LONGLISTED FOR THE MAN BOOKER PRIZE 2016

Selected as a Book of the Year 2016 in the Observer and Daily Telegraph

When you travel across the ocean on a boat, all your memories are washed away and you start a completely new life. That is how it is. There is no before. There is no history. The boat docks at the harbour and we climb down the gangplank and we are plunged into the here and now. Time begins.

Davíd is the small boy who is always asking questions. Simón and Inés take care of him in their new town Estrella. He is learning the language; he has begun to make friends. He has the big dog Bolívar to watch over him. But he'll be seven soon and he should be at school. And so, Davíd is enrolled in the Academy of Dance. It's here, in his new golden dancing slippers, that he learns how to call down the numbers from the sky. But it's here too that he will make troubling discoveries about what grown-ups are capable of.

In this mesmerising allegorical tale, Coetzee deftly grapples with the big questions of growing up, of what it means to be a parent, the constant battle between intellect and emotion, and how we choose to live our lives.

Reviews provided by Syndetics

Library Journal Review

Simon and Ines are struggling to raise six-year-old David in a way that encourages his free thinking but also allows him to keep pace with other children his age. After disastrous attempts at traditional schooling and tutoring, they are not sure what to do. When the owners of the farm they are working on offer to pay David's tuition at the Academy of Dance, these parents gratefully accept. The academy is a mystical, philosophical school where children call down the numbers from the heavens by dancing them. When the instructor is brutally murdered by her lover, David discovers the body and Simon tries to help him deal with the aftereffects. Coetzee's allegorical story is full of bizarre characters who seem to have no notion of how to deal with small children or one another. Coetzee makes no attempt to explain the story's setting, leaving the listener to interpret what it means when characters have their memories "wiped clean" or make vague religious and philosophical references alluding to the loss of technology or animal species. James Cameron Stewart's narration is very stiff, making it difficult for the listener to tell one character from another. VERDICT The poor narration and Coetzee's ambiguous plot and ending result in a confusing and difficult-to-understand surrealism that may perplex listeners to the point of frustration. ["Only those who enjoy philosophical conundrums will want to take a look": LJ 1/17 review of the Viking hc.]-Terry Ann Lawler, Phoenix P.L. © Copyright 2017. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

Publishers Weekly Review

The temperature rises ever so slightly in Nobel winner Coetzee's (The Childhood of Jesus) latest, the second installment of his wintry gospel that beguiles as often as it numbs. Coetzee's fable continues as Símon-stolid, devoted-and Inés-reticent, passionless-have taken their ward, Davíd, and fled Novilla, the stultifying socialist city whose nightlife (which consists of philosophical lectures) is as flavorless as its dietary staple (bean paste). The nontraditional family begins yet another new life, now in a provincial town (in an unspecified country), Estrella, in "the year of the census." Davíd, the "magistral" child whose true name remains a mystery, enrolls in a dance academy whose instructors espouse mystical notions about embodied Platonic forms: "To bring the numbers down from where they reside, to allow them to manifest themselves in our midst, to give them body, we rely on the dance." Símon initially views this as "harmless nonsense," an attitude that widens the gulf between him and his inquisitive charge. He responds to Davíd's ceaseless questions with "dry little homilies" that seldom satisfy the otherworldly child. These Socratic sallies can grate rather than illuminate, and the novel's Biblical allusions can seem more coy than revelatory. In The Childhood of Jesus, Don Quixote's visionary gusto inspired young Davíd; here, there are darker, Dostoyevskian drives at play. Davíd is attracted to exuberant characters who, unlike his guardians, flout conventional morality. Enter Dmitri, a museum attendant infatuated with Davíd's ethereally beautiful dance instructor, to provide a welcome, and violent, jolt of immeasurable passion to the novel's measured world. (Feb.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

Booklist Review

*Starred Review* Nobel laureate Coetzee's sequel to The Childhood of Jesus (2013) continues the enigmatic parable with its meandering, philosophical tone and hints at allegory. But the questions Coetzee raises may be evolving. Davíd (not his real name, we are reminded) and his adoptive parents, Simón and Inés, have fled Novilla for the countryside town of Estrella and found solace working on a farm, but it is time for the boy to go to school. The Academy of Dance captivates the boy with its unusual approach to teaching integers through dance, while unexpected extracurricular events, including a crime of complicated passion, provide the opportunity for a moral education as well. As in the earlier book, Coetzee is interested in the tension between desire and reason, and his characters engage in Socratic-style conversations about such matters dialogue, along with some Don Quixote references and old-fashioned phrasings that generate feelings of artifice and otherworldliness. Coetzee is also focused here on parenting, education in the deepest sense, and how, as a parent, to accept distance, when one's whole life has been built around the child. As compelling, and confounding, as its predecessor, Coetzee's newest also invites questions about what his protagonist's next years may bring. HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: Anticipation and promotional efforts are in high gear for Coetzee's Man Booker longlist continuation of his acclaimed previous novel.--Driscoll, Brendan Copyright 2016 Booklist