In that novel, we met Davíd and Simón, arriving memory-less in a Spanish-speaking city named Novilla.
The Schooldays of Jesus follows on the heels of its predecessor, The Childhood of Jesus. I spent three happy years writing my PhD on Coetzee, and my love for his early work survived meeting the man in person (like a wet weekend in Grimsby) and a run of several baffling “novels” (since his Man Booker-winning Disgrace in 1999) which seemed bent on stripping away all of the satisfactions we look for in fiction. I need to say this at the outset to offer some context to the battle I fought with The Schooldays of Jesus, his 13th novel. JM Coetzee is my favourite living author.
