Strangers in a strange land
Nobel laureate J.M. Coetzee begins his latest novel with an epigraph from the second part of “Don Quixote,” published in 1615, 10 years after the first part. Coetzee does not bother to translate Cervantes’ Spanish: “Algunos dicen: Nunca segundas partes fueron buenas.” If it is indeed true that, as some say, sequels are never good, what are we to make of a new book, “The Schooldays of Jesus,” which is itself a sequel to “The Childhood of Jesus,” an enigmatic fiction that Coetzee published in 2013?
In the earlier work, an immigrant named Simón adopts a lost boy named Davíd aboard a ship bound for an unidentified land. Eventually, Simón recruits a woman named Inés to serve as mother to Davíd, a willful and precocious child who teaches himself to read through a copy of “Don Quixote.” A discordant echo of Joseph, Mary and Jesus, Simón, Inés and Davíd form an oddly holy family. Throughout his elliptical text, Coetzee teases with faint allusions to biblical parables.
At the outset of “The Schooldays of Jesus,” Simón, Inés and Davíd have fled the town of Novilla, where Davíd has defied government orders that he enroll in a faraway school. Arriving in Estrella, they find work picking grapes. But the 6-year-old needs schooling, and, after Davíd spurns a private math tutor, Simón enrolls him in the Academy of Dance, run by a reclusive musician named Juan Sebastián Arroyo. His glacially beautiful young wife, Ana Magdalena, provides pupils with “training of the soul through music and dance.” A hideous crime committed by a Dostoevskyan wretch forces the academy to close and the reader to ponder the qualities of justice and forgiveness.
Though it begins with a Spanish epigraph and is set in a Spanish-speaking country, “The Schooldays of Jesus” is written in English, as if in translation. Scattered throughout the text, Spanish words such as novio, amigo and huérfano are clear from context, but the effect is to create a kind of linguistic scrim, as if, like the foreigner Simón, we, too, are strangers in a strange land. Forced to make do with an English approximation, we are forever denied access to the original.
The name of the town, Estrella, is Spanish for star, and Señor Arroyo embraces a kind of Orphic belief in a transcendental stellar Truth. He contends that pure numbers are a representation of that Truth and that, when guided by the soul, dance can evoke pure numbers and provide intimation of the starry firmament. In this as in everything else, Simón is an outsider. Rational and passionless, he is skeptical of Arroyo’s esoteric theory, calling it “claptrap” and “a load of mystical rubbish.” Though the novel concludes with Simón’s first dance lesson and an image of the first star rising on the horizon, it is not certain whether Coetzee is endorsing Arroyo’s mysticism or mocking it as claptrap.
Despite the coy title, no one named Jesus inhabits this novel. Coetzee drops enough hints to tempt a reader into suspecting allegory, though it is never clear of exactly what. Like Arroyo, Coetzee is a storytelling tease. When Simón demands to know the basis of the intuitions the master of the academy relies on, Arroyo replies: “The answer will come when you least expect it. Or else it will not come.” That is called begging the question, the natural action of the novelist’s mendicant profession.
It is possible to see Davíd, whose identity remains murky, as an incarnation of divinity, or else as a spoiled boy handicapped by what his would-be math tutor calls a “cognitive deficit.” When Simón introduces him to Roberta, the overseer of the farm where they find shelter, the child announces: “Davíd is not my real name.” But when he follows up with the question: “Do you want to know my real name?” Roberta does not respond, and, in a world in which names are merely aliases, approximations, we never learn to call him anything but Davíd. Coetzee has again hinted at something we will never know.
Resembling the Platonic dialogues more than the four canonical gospels, “The Schooldays of Jesus” proceeds through a series of conversations about fundamental topics such as education, passion, numbers, justice, penance and death. By challenging his interlocutors with faux-naif questions about basic beliefs, Plato’s Socrates exposes what passes for conventional wisdom as utter ignorance. Similarly, when Simón advises Davíd to judge people by their inner qualities, the boy asks: “What are inner qualities?” Simón’s predictable response, that it is important to distinguish between beauty and honesty, is not a totally honest explanation.
Some will likely find this novel exasperatingly evasive. But if, as Arroyo claims, “the stars have dances of their own,” Coetzee’s novel — a fresh addition to his Jesus franchise — is an invitation to the celestial dance.