I finished it the other day. I won't claim that I actually understood it, but I liked it. A lot. Though the story is in a way straightforward (man and boy arrive in a new place, go looking for the boy's mother), the setting surely is not, which makes it all difficult to interpret. The new place they arrive at is an unnamed country where people speak Spanish; when they arrive they are given new names and new birthdays. It's a rather bland place, and most people also seem to almost have no knowledge of what happened before they arrived, though most if not all are "refugees" of some sorts, same as the two main characters are. There's conversations, lots of them, often about philosophical topics. So that all makes it rather allegorical, but an allegory of what, I don't know. Thankfully, after reading some reviews here and there in newspapers, I'm not the only one, it seems!
The title is already misleading, or at least, it's not clear to me why this novel would be called The Childhood of Jesus. Maybe at some level it is, but it doesn't quite seem to fit; in that respect, when reading the article quoted in the post above, I liked the Leonard Cohen quote, "just some Joseph looking for a manger", which seems fitting, somehow. Anyway, perhaps Coetzee just wanted to address the topics he addresses in the conversations, and put it all in this highly distracting form with an even more distracting title. Which ever it is, it worked for me - I got drawn into it pretty quickly, and wanted to know where the story was going, even if I didn't have a clear idea of why it would be going there.
This was the third novel of Coetzee I read. "Waiting for the barbarians" was the first one, a loooong time ago, I should reread it. Then, "Disgrace", a few years ago, and I liked that one. So I picked this one up from the library because of the author, not the title. I do wonder, for how many will it be the other way around, and what will they then do with the novel?
