J.M.Coetzee's novel 'Youth'

Among the magazines he comes across in Dillons is The African Communist. He has heard about The African Communist but not actually seen it hitherto, since it is banned in South Africa. Of the contributors, some, to his surprise, turn out to be contemporaries of his from Cape Town - fellow students of the kind who slept all day and went to parties in the evenings, got drunk, sponged on their parents, failed examinations, took five years over their three-year degrees. Yet here they are writing authoritative-sounding articles about the economics of migratory labour or uprisings in rural Transkei. Where, amid all the dancing and drinking and debauchery, did they find the time to learn about such things?

http://www.theguardian.com/books/2003/oct/10/nobelprize.awardsandprizes

I enjoyed reading the South African writer J.M.Coetzee's novel Youth, about a disillusioning South African student who moves to London to become a poet but instead because a computer programmer in Bracknell.

I thought the passage above was especially amusing!