READERS GUIDE

Questions and Topics for Discussion

INTRODUCTION

In The Childhood of Jesus, Nobel Laureate and two-time Booker Prize–winning J. M. Coetzee returns to the allegorical style of his acclaimed 1980 novel, Waiting for the Barbarians. A middle-aged man named Simón and a six-year-old boy named David arrive at the town of Novilla in an unspecified, Spanish-speaking country. They have come from a camp, by boat, and appear to be refugees, though from what is unclear. Strangers in a strange land, they hope to start a new life in Novilla and to find David’s mother.

Simón arrives with one unshakable conviction: that he will know the boy’s mother when he sees her—a conviction based entirely on intuition. He has never seen David’s mother, has no photographs of her, does not know her name or anything about her. Nevertheless, he has no doubts that he will recognize her.

Shortly after arriving in Novilla, Simón takes a grueling job as a stevedore, unloading the sacks of grain that will be used to make the bread on which the town relies, almost exclusively, for its nourishment—as if to refute Jesus’ assertion that man cannot live by bread alone. Indeed, Simón finds the blandness of life in Novilla exasperating. He engages in one argument after another: with his boss and fellow stevedores; with Elena, the mother of David’s friend Fidel; and virtually everyone else he meets in Novilla. His suggestion that the dock workers use a crane to liberate themselves from brute labor and allow them to do more meaningful work is met with bafflement, just as his need for sex and what Elena calls “the something-more that is missing” is dismissed as a hopeless illusion, impossible to satisfy and foolish to pursue.

While out for a walk, Simón and David encounter a woman playing tennis and Simón instantly “knows” her to be David’s mother. Though she has never seen David, Inés reluctantly agrees to take over the care of the child. Absurdity slides into reality, as Inés fully assumes the role of mother, becoming as fiercely overprotective as if she had borne and raised the child herself.

Then there is the question of David’s education, both formal and informal. At home, Simón tries to answer David’s many dogged existential questions: How are people different from “poo”? What are dead bodies? What is value? At school, David infuriates his teacher, Señor Leon, with various acts of “insubordination”: refusing (or pretending not to know how) to read or count, and disturbing his classmates. The school psychologist wants to separate David from his “parents” and place him in a special school, far from home, a plan which Inés and Simón vehemently oppose.

Novilla—the word contains echoes of villa, village, and novel—is a strange and unsettling place, or rather a no-place, a stripped-down stage set on which the characters carry out their Beckett-like philosophical debates. The inhabitants have been “washed clean” of their former lives as well as all desire for something more. They are content with things as they are, no questions asked. They are, as Simón notes, a passionless people, incapable of either irony or strong emotion. “No one swears or gets angry. No one gets drunk. No one even raises his voice” (p. 30). They do not suffer from the need for meaning, purpose, sexual and spiritual fulfillment that afflicts Simón. But have they transcended such desires or merely accepted a diminished version of full human potential?

Much in The Childhood of Jesus remains ambiguous, including the title itself. Is David a Christ figure? His “mother,” Inés, is a virgin. When his teacher tells him to write “I must tell the truth” on the blackboard, he writes “I am the truth” instead. Biblical references abound, but don’t seem to point to a coherent allegorical design. Or do they?

Coetzee’s magical and austere novel invites readers to investigate the many existential questions raised within its pages, as well as the larger question of the purpose and meaning of the novel itself.

J. M. Coetzeewon the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2003 and is the author of twenty-one books, which have been translated into many languages. He was the first author to twice win the Booker Prize. A native of South Africa, he now lives in Adelaide, Australia.

1. What kind of world does Coetzee create in Novilla? What is the atmosphere of the town? What rules govern the thoughts and behavior of its inhabitants? Why do Simón and David have such a hard time fitting in?


2. In a 2003 interview with David Attwell, Coetzee said, “I do not treat the creation of fiction, that is to say the invention and development of fantasies, as a form of abstract thought. I don’t wish to deny the uses of the intellect, but sometimes one has the intuition that the intellect by itself will lead one nowhere.” In what ways does The Childhood of Jesus develop a tension between fact and fantasy, intellect and intuition, order and chaos?


3. When David’s teacher, Señor Leon, tells him to write on the blackboard, “I must tell the truth,” David writes instead, “I am the truth” (p. 225). What other significant Biblical references appear in the novel? Is David a Christ figure?


4. David offers to help Simón unplug the toilet by suggesting that he can give him ideas. Simón replies, “alas, toilets are not receptive to ideas. Toilets are not part of the realm of ideas, they are just brute things, and working with them is nothing but brute work.” Simón also explains death to David by saying that dead bodies have to stay behind but that there is an afterlife. “We are not like poo, that has to stay behind and be mixed again with the earth. . . . We are like ideas. Ideas never die” (p. 133). Is Coetzee being serious or playful here? Or serious and playful at the same time? Can The Childhood of Jesus be read as a comic novel? What other moments of deadpan philosophical absurdity occur in the novel?


5. David is repeatedly described as gifted and he himself feels possessed of magical powers—to breathe life back into the dead, to make himself invisible, et cetera. How are we to regard David? Is he special? Or simply a spoiled and willful child? Is his defiance of Señor Leon an admirable refusal to be socialized into a deadening conformity or is he simply being obstinate?


6. The inhabitants of Novilla have no burning desires and seem to live contented lives. Their diet is bland, consisting mostly of bread and soup, and their entertainments are few. Simón’s fellow stevedores are puzzled by his desire to do more “meaningful” work. Similarly, Elena suggests that Simón’s passions are foolish and destructive. “This endless dissatisfaction,” she says, “this yearning for the something-more that is missing, is a way of thinking we are well rid of, in my opinion. Nothing is missing. The nothing that you think is missing is an illusion. You are living by an illusion” (p. 63). Would Simón be happier if he could accept Elena’s rather Buddhist perspective? Or would that be surrendering to a vacuous animal-like existence? Does the novel itself seem to endorse one view over the other?


7. Elena chastises Simón for giving David to Inés, a woman he knows nothing about. “Investigating her qualifications as a mother was not necessary, you said: you could rely on intuition. . . . Intuition: what sort of basis is that for deciding a child’s future?” David replies, “What is wrong with native intuition? What else is there we can trust, finally?” To which Elena answers, “Common sense. Reason. Any reasonable person would have warned you that a thirty-year-old virgin used to a life of idleness, insulated from the real world, guarded by two thuggish brothers, would not make a reliable mother” (p. 104-105). Does Simón make a mistake in giving David to Inés? Why is Simón so sure that she is David’s mother? Does Inés turn out to be a bad mother? How does she treat David?


8. Simón references Voltaire’s satirical novella Candide when he tells his boss Alvero, who misses the irony, that “all is for the best in this best of all possible worlds” (p. 41).Is Coetzee, in his depiction of Novilla, satirizing a particular way of life? A particular way of thinking?


9. Most contemporary fiction is realistic and relatively straightforward. What are the pleasures and challenges of reading an elusive book like The Childhood of Jesus?


10. Simón tells Eugenio, “There are two schools of thought, Eugenio, on the upbringing of children. One says that we should shape them like clay, forming them into virtuous citizens. The other says that we are children only once, that a happy childhood is the foundation of a happy later life. Inés belongs to the latter school; and, because she is his mother, because the bonds between a child and his mother are sacred, I follow her” (p. 251). In what ways is the novel not just about a particular childhood but childhood itself—what it means to be and to become a human being?


11. At the end of the novel, Simón, Inés, David, the dog, Bolívar, and the hitchhiker Juan set off for Estrellita, where they hope to start a new life. Will their lives there likely be a repetition of their experience in Novilla, or does the novel point to a genuine new beginning for them?