The author of “Youth” - South African writer, Nobel Prize winner John Michael Coetzee - addresses a topic that is both quite special and eternal, at least as long as literature exists: “a portrait of the artist as a youth.” Obsession with life's ultimate task and doubts in one's abilities, pride mixed with timidity, first love experiences, zealous and jealous reading, poverty and odd jobs that distract from the work of one's life...

A native of South Africa, John, hastily leaves his homeland. The dream of every aspiring artist - to get to Europe with its culture - comes true even more quickly than one might expect: the hero flees Cape Town, gripped by the unrest of the indigenous black population, and ends up in London. Here he gets a job as a clerk in a computer company, barely makes ends meet and feels like a stranger, just like in his homeland. More and more often it seems to him that England is pushing him away, but he is not even a “political refugee” - for he fled “from boredom... From philistinism. From moral atrophy. Out of shame.” The gray, boring, routine life leads the hero to the idea that his only gift is the gift of “suffering, boring, honest suffering.”

Together with a young provincial settling in in London, we are again - only on the opposite side of the Berlin walls - we “live” and comprehend the everyday life of the “Cold War”, the “Cuban crisis”, the trial of Joseph Brodsky, the Vietnam War, the problems of “man and computer” (who ultimately subjugates whom - in connection with which the author is on behalf of the hero shares with readers the guess that “logic is a human invention, and not part of the fabric of existence”) - and much more.

In the end, the author brings the hero to the need for a fragile reconciliation with life, which the hero is completely unable to joy, puts a self-deprecating internal monologue into his mouth and leaves him to his fate, taking full advantage of the harsh copyright to ask uncomfortable questions - and not answer them.