The Schooldays of Jesus

South African author J.M. Coetzee’s thirteenth novel, The Schooldays of Jesus is a sequel to The Childhood of Jesus (2013). It picks up the story of Davíd, a young boy raised in a foreign country by people who are not his parents. In The Schooldays, Davíd attends a dance academy, where he becomes involved in a murder. The novel was longlisted for the 2016 Man Booker Prize (an award which Coetzee, also a Nobel laureate, has won twice).

The novel opens as Simón and Inés arrive with Davíd, the six-year-old boy in their care, in the (fictional) town of Estrella, somewhere in an unidentified Spanish-speaking country. They are running away from Novilla, where government officials have tried to separate Davíd from Simón and Inés because they are neither his parents nor his legal guardians.

Simón and Inés decide to settle in Estrella, and Simón goes to work on a local farm, owned by three sisters. Davíd is of an age to attend school, but Simón and Inés are worried that entering him in the public school system will alert the officials to his whereabouts. Instead, they hire a tutor, Señor Robles, but Robles insists on teaching Davíd only extremely abstract, impractical knowledge.



The spinster sisters who own the farm take a liking to Davíd, and they offer to pay for him to be privately educated, if Simón and Inés can find a suitable school.

Eventually, they decide upon the town’s Academy of Dance. The proprietress, Ana Magdalena Arroyo, teaches dance as a spiritual discipline. She teaches nothing else. Simón and Inés are concerned that Davíd will be left with no general education, but Davíd enjoys his lessons at the Academy so much that they decide to let him stay.

After a while, Davíd asks if he can board at the Academy. When Simón and Inés are initially reluctant, Davíd tells them that Ana Magdalena understands him more deeply than they do. Although hurt, they allow Davíd to board full-time at the Academy.



Simón learns that the Academy janitor, Dmitri, who claims to be madly in love with Ana Magdalena, has been showing pornographic pictures to the students. Simón warns him to stop, or he will report Dmitri to the authorities.

Shortly afterward, Dmitri and Ana Magdalena disappear. Everyone assumes that they have eloped, but Simón and Davíd stumble upon Ana Magdalena’s body in the Academy. She has been strangled. However, Dmitri cannot be found.

Eventually, Dmitri turns up at the local police station. He confesses to Ana Magdalena’s murder, claiming that he was so frustrated by his unrequited passion that he raped Ana Magdalena and then strangled her.



Simón visits Dmitri as the latter awaits trial, and Dmitri asks him to burn his personal papers, telling him that they can be found in a filing cabinet at the Academy.

At trial, Dmitri pleads guilty and asks to receive the harshest possible sentence. Instead, he is ordered to spend a year in a mental institution, where psychologists can observe him before his case is decided.

Simón retrieves Dmitri’s personal papers and finds that they contain love letters from Ana Magdalena to Dmitri, contradicting Dmitri’s story. Simón cannot decide whether they are real or not, and whether he should hand them over to the police or not.



Dmitri arrives at Simón and Inés’s house: the mental institution is barely secure. Dmitri tells Simón that he intends to go to the salt mines to serve a life sentence as a worker there, in order to pay off the moral debt of his murder. While Dmitri returns to the institution, Simón tries to decide what he should do about the letters. He concludes that they are real and that Dmitri killed Ana Magdalena not out of frustration but simply because he wanted to.

Simón visits Ana Magdalena’s husband, Señor Arroyo, to ask if the Academy will re-open. Arroyo says he doesn’t know. Simón and Inés wonder what to do about Davíd, who is infatuated with the spiritual approach to dance taught at the Academy.

Simón and Davíd spectate a debate between Arroyo and academic Señor Moreno. During the debate, Dmitri arrives, demanding Arroyo’s forgiveness for the murder of his wife. Simón intuits that Dmitri is maneuvering to avoid paying his debt in the salt mines, so he calls the police, who take Dmitri away.



Simón learns that Ana Magdalena’s sister Mercedes plans to reopen the Academy of Dance. He and Inés debate whether Davíd should return to school there. In the novel’s final scene, Simón visits Mercedes and asks her to teach him to dance.

Through extended dialogue and allegorical storytelling, The Schooldays of Jesus explores profound spiritual themes: above all, the nature of the journey between life and death, and what is learned along the way. Although the novel was generally well-received, some critics found its mysteriousness “vexing” (Kirkus Reviews).