why? i liked it.

>>7366137

I'm not saying I didn't like it, it's more that the book evoked.... very real, angry emotions in me. It wasn't cathartic anger but Coetzee's writing (which I like, Youth is a very good read) to create such a scenario, characters and settings evoked a very strong reaction in me.

>>7366164
If anything, I felt frustrated occasionally by the increasing impotence embodied by the narrator, which didn't really feel earned. I can't think of any specific examples, but it seemed like Coetzee had him do things that didn't make any sense just to move the plot along, which in being so plainly allegorical felt more like an argument than a story for me to get emotionally involved in. But ultimately there was just so much going on figuratively and there's so much suspense throughout that I was almost giddy after reading it.

>>7366196
I guess in thinking about it now what really made no sense to me is why the narrator refuses to admit he has done anything wrong when he's at the academic trial. I get that the whole plot and its allegorical superstructure would fall apart without this happening, which is exactly why it felt so much like cheating.

>>7366119
One of my favourite contemporary novels t b h

Can definitely agree that it made me angry at certain points

>>7366204
he refuses to admit wrongdoing because he fancies himself a Byron, who lives in opposition to bourgeois society, so he does not have to apologize to them for doing what he does. in fact, though, he is bourgeois as hell, obviously, and not a free-spirited, passionate Byron at all. he's too smart for all these plebs and their plebby values, basically, because he's a patrician scholar.

After the sweet young flesh of Melanie Isaacs,
this is what I have come to. This is what I will have to get used to, this and even less than this.
'It's late,' says Bev Shaw. 'I must be going.'
He pushes the blanket aside and gets up, making no effort to hide himself. Let her gaze her fill on her Romeo, he thinks, on his bowed shoulders and skinny shanks. It is indeed late. On the horizon lies a last crimson glow; the moon looms overhead; smoke hangs in the air; across a strip of waste land, from the first rows of shacks, comes a hubbub of voices. At the door Bev presses herself against him a last time, rests her head on his chest. He lets her do it, as he has let her do everything she has felt a need to do. His thoughts go to Emma Bovary strutting before the mirror after her first big afternoon. / have a lover! I have a lover! sings Emma to herself. Well, let poor Bev Shaw go home and do some singing too. And let him stop calling her poor Bev Shaw. If she is poor, he is bankrupt.

Coetzee is the king of the contemporary gloom & doom brand of 'serious literature'. Not beautiful and passionate and sad, just saddening. Awards committee bait. Cliche-ridden at the sentence level. A non-entity. Ephemeral. Pass.

I start reading this book, than I thought, oh wait, I guess I already read this. Than I realized this is actually another book. What other books talk about a teacher/student relationship? I read Stoner, but it is not this one, it is another.

>>7366530
lol cornfatherposting always does it for me

>>7366530
[citation needed]