AustLit

'On January 11, on a sweltering summer afternoon in Cape Town, J.M. Coetzee gave a rare public reading in the home town he left, somewhat precipitously, fifteen years ago to take up a teaching post in Adelaide, South Australia. The reading took place at the Irma Stern Museum in the city’s southern suburbs, currently hosting an exhibition of arresting Coetzee juvenilia: “Photographs from Boyhood,” a recently discovered trove that the author took in the mid-Fifties when he was a schoolboy growing up in these suburbs. In his wry and unsparing way, Coetzee projected a series of these images onto a screen and read related extracts from his 1997 fictionalized memoir Boyhood (he calls the genre “autre-biography,” because it always involves making an artifact of one’s life for an “other”).' (Introduction)