Boyhood Scenes from Provincial Life

Summary: "A short and unsettling, deftly realized memoir....This is not an eventful memoir--its strength comes, instead, from Coetzee's nuanced, unblinking perceptions. His childhood was not unhappy in the conventional sense; the sadness and tragedies were mainly of the ordinary kind, and in his masterful depiction of them, that's what makes them so shattering....[A] powerful, disillusioned portrait of childhood..."