耶稣的童年 (2013)

《耶稣的童年》（英语：The Childhood of Jesus），是南非英语作家约翰·马克斯韦尔·库切的长篇小说。

内容

《耶稣的童年》虽然名字里有基督教人物“耶稣”，但是该长篇小说却不是写耶稣的，也不是写宗教的，而是叙述了男人“西蒙”带着孩子“大卫”寻找妈妈，最后和网球运动员“伊妮丝”组建家庭。

西蒙和大卫在船上相遇，大卫的妈妈遗失了他，而他的身份证也丢失了，西蒙带着年仅5岁的男孩大卫在外国的一个名叫“诺维拉安置中心”歇脚，西蒙需要一个住所和一份工作他，他在帮助大卫寻找妈妈。

西蒙最终在码头上当搬运工挣钱吃饭，不过这里并不像大卫母亲来过。于是，西蒙决心帮大卫找一个新妈妈算了。

一次，西蒙和大卫在散步，遇到了网球运动员伊妮丝，他请求她当大卫的母亲，他们三人最终组成一个新家庭，在这个国度，开始了新的生活。

主题和风格

该长篇小说暗示了“人类迁徙”的行为，这深深来源于他的生活，因为库切也并非南非土著人，他是荷兰裔南非人，他必须融入南非社会。

译著

简体中文版本已经由翻译家文敏翻译。

The Childhood of Jesus is a 2013 novel by South African-born Australian Nobel laureate J. M. Coetzee.

Synopsis

The book follows a man and a boy who emigrate to a new land. Once there, they receive new names and rough estimates of their age and are taught Spanish to help them acclimatise to their new surroundings. Simón, the elder of the two, begins working at a grain wharf and slowly befriends his fellow workers. At the same time, Simón must find a way to locate the mother of the young boy David, who remembers nothing about her but assumes that he will recognize her when he sees her. During a walk, Simon sees a woman he believes is David's mother, and he subsequently talks her into assuming the role. However, while she begins to care for David, the authorities insist that he be sent to a distant school. Refusing to give him up, Simón and the woman flee in hopes of outrunning their pursuers and retaining custody of David.

Publication

The book was published simultaneously on 7 March 2013, by Jonathan Cape (UK) and Text Publishing (Australia). The U.S. edition was published on 3 September 2013, by Viking. It was also published in Spanish translation, partly because it relates to Coetzee's interest in Argentine literature and resisting what he calls the "hegemony of the English language".

Reception

Tim Adams of The Observer believed it to be "an early contender for an unprecedented third Booker prize".

The Australian also praised The Childhood of Jesus, stating that it was "a masterpiece".

Theo Tait, writing in The Guardian, said that The Childhood of Jesus was "richly enigmatic, with regular flashes of Coetzee's piercing intelligence" and compared the book to the rest of what he termed Coetzee's "admirable but forbidding canon". Tait wrote, "Personally, I would put The Childhood of Jesus some distance behind his conspicuous masterpieces, such as Life & Times of Michael K, Waiting for the Barbarians and Disgrace, and also behind the wonderful autobiographical trilogy that ended with Summertime". Nevertheless, said Tait, The Childhood of Jesus "probably belongs in the strange-but-interesting section, with his Crusoe story Foe and Elizabeth Costello."

Upon its U.S. publication, David Ulin, the Los Angeles Times book critic, said it "ultimately falls prey to the emptiness it describes. Partly, this has to do with its meandering quality; in a land without history, even those who seek not to forget must lose sight of the past. But even more, the issue is the distance in Coetzee's writing, the feeling that his characters are less living flesh-and-blood than signifiers of some idea. When his novels are working (as in Life and Times of Michael K. or the magnificent Waiting for the Barbarians), Coetzee's ideas are big enough to seize us, to give us a new set of lenses on the world. With The Childhood of Jesus, however, the allegory never extends beyond itself, beyond the image of a small group of wanderers, adrift in an uncharted universe, "looking for somewhere to stay".

Anthony Uhlmann, in the Sydney Review of Books, discussed ways in which the novel could be understood as part of a dialogue with the works of Gerald Murnane.