The Death of Jesus

A Novel

By: J. M. Coetzee

Narrated by: Cameron Stewart

A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK OF 2020

After The Childhood of Jesus and The Schooldays of Jesus, the Nobel Prize-winning author completes his haunting trilogy with a new masterwork, The Death of Jesus

In Estrella, David has grown to be a tall ten-year-old who is a natural at soccer, and loves kicking a ball around with his friends. His father Simón and Bolívar the dog usually watch while his mother Inés now works in a fashion boutique. David still asks many questions, challenging his parents, and any authority figure in his life. In dancing class at the Academy of Music he dances as he chooses. He refuses to do sums and will not read any books except Don Quixote.

One day Julio Fabricante, the director of a nearby orphanage, invites David and his friends to form a proper soccer team. David decides he will leave Simón and Inés to live with Julio, but before long he succumbs to a mysterious illness. In The Death of Jesus, J. M. Coetzee continues to explore the meaning of a world empty of memory but brimming with questions.

The story is lost in the narration.

The book tells the heartwrenching story of the death of a child, but the emotions are filtered away by the narrator, who reads the story as if it were the headline news. I might have felt the story closer to the heart if it had been read with warmth and compassion.

Well-written simple story of an uninteresting Family Life

Possibly an example of the Author’s belief that Life had no meaning and bore little interest to the Common Man. It came close to convincing me because upon finishing I wondered why I had wasted time listening to it.