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Bound With These Titles
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Summary
Summary
Shortlisted for the 2009 Man Booker Prize
A brilliant new work of fiction from the Nobel Prize-winning author of Disgrace and Diary of a Bad Year
A young English biographer is researching a book about the late South African writer John Coetzee, focusing on Coetzee in his thirties, at a time when he was living in a rundown cottage in the Cape Town suburbs with his widowed father-a time, the biographer is convinced, when Coetzee was finding himself as a writer. Never having met the man himself, the biographer interviews five people who knew Coetzee well, including a married woman with whom he had an affair, his cousin Margot, and a Brazilian dancer whose daughter took English lessons with him. These accounts add up to an image of an awkward, reserved, and bookish young man who finds it hard to make meaningful connections with the people around him.
Summertime is an inventive and inspired work of fiction that allows J.M. Coetzee to imagine his own life with a critical and unsparing eye, revealing painful moral struggles and attempts to come to grips with what it means to care for another human being. Incisive, elegant, and often surprisingly funny, Summertime is a compelling work by one of today's most esteemed writers.
Author Notes
J.M. Coetzee's full name is John Michael Coetzee. Born in Cape Town, South Africa, in 1940, Coetzee is a writer and critic who uses the political situation in his homeland as a backdrop for many of his novels. Coetzee published his first work of fiction, Dusklands, in 1974.
Another book, Boyhood, loosely chronicles an unhappy time in Coetzee's childhood when his family moved from Cape Town to the more remote and unenlightened city of Worcester. Other Coetzee novels are In the Heart of the Country and Waiting for the Barbarians. Coetzee's critical works include White Writing and Giving Offense: Essays on Censorship.
Coetzee is a two-time recipient of the Booker Prize and in 2003, he won the Nobel Literature Award.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (7)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Nobel laureate and two-time Booker-winner Coetzee has been shortlisted for the third time for this powerful novel, a semisequel to the fictionalized memoirs Boyhood and Youth that takes the form of a young biographer's interviews with colleagues of the late author John Coetzee. To Dr. Julia Frankl, who briefly sought in Coetzee deliverance from her husband, he was "not fully human"; to his cousin, Margot Jonker, he is boring, ridiculous and misguided; and to Sophie Deno'l, an expert in African literature, Coetzee is an underwhelming writer with "no original insight into the human condition." The harshest characterization and also the best of the interviews comes from Adriana Nascimento, a Brazilian emigrant who met Coetzee when both were teachers in Cape Town; she was repulsed by the intellectual's attempts at courtship. "He is nothing," she says, "was nothing... an embarrassment." The biographer's efforts to describe his subject ultimately result in an examination that reaches through fiction and memoir to grasp what the traditional record leaves out. (Jan.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Booklist Review
In the Nobel laureate's latest novel, a young English writer is in pursuit of first-person testimony to write a biography of an esteemed novelist named J. M. Coetzee. The Englishman wants to focus on the years 1971-77, a period just before Coetzee's importance was recognized, a time the hopeful biographer finds oddly neglected by other biographers; he sees it as seminal because the novelist was finding his feet. From Coetzee's lover, his cousin, the mother of a pupil to whom Coetzee gave English lessons, a cohort who co-taught a college course with him, and another professional affiliate, the biographer elicits details about the man's relationships, amorous and otherwise. These personal accounts are the material from which readers draw a picture of Coetzee and upon which the biographer will draw for his future composition. The Coetzee emerging here is an emotionally desiccated man never easy with intercourse of any shade, sexual or social. Assumptions on the reader's part of a parallel between the fictitious Coetzee and the actual one are best left alone, because the result can only be confusion and distraction. It is best, then, to simply see the character as just that and then to recognize the author as the admirable builder of character that he is.--Hooper, Brad Copyright 2009 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
GREAT men in the winter of their lives often treat the writing of their memoirs as a kind of victory lap, but whatever J.M. Coetzee is after in this third volume of his genre-bending autobiography, it is not self-congratulation. The first two volumes, unadornedly titled "Boyhood" and "Youth" (and, in contrast to this one, labeled nonfiction), were marked by Coetzee's decision to write about himself in the third person. In "Summertime" he takes this schism one bracing step farther, by imagining himself already dead. The book is nominally a kind of rough-draft effort by Coetzee's own biographer, an Englishman named Vincent, to build the case - through transcribed interviews with lovers and colleagues and other figures mentioned by Coetzee in his "posthumously" opened notebooks - for the years 1971-77 as an especially formative period in the late author's life, "a period," as Vincent would have it, "when he was still finding his feet as a writer." Not much happens to Coetzee, strictly speaking, in those years. Having returned to South Africa from a sojourn in America, he lives in suburban Cape Town with his ailing father - a development especially resonant to readers of "Boyhood," much of which centered around the lack of attachment, bordering on mutual shame, between father and son. He takes various teaching jobs despite his evident lack of talent for it (academia being, we are told by one of his former colleagues, a profession "full of refugees and misfits"). He rather sentimentally contemplates moving back to, or at any rate near, the ancestral farm his father's family still owns in the sun-blasted Karoo, even though the exigencies of that life are clearly beyond him. His mother has died; he has a brother, but that brother is "overseas" and, just as in the first two volumes, hardly acknowledged. And, very quietly, he publishes his first book, the bone-dry "Dusklands" - a pair of novellas that offer little hint of the majesty of later novels like "Waiting for the Barbarians" or "Disgrace." But interestingly, they do (and did, in real life) contain important, offstage characters named Coetzee. Thus his impulse to metafictionalize himself is perhaps nothing new. Even Vincent envisions his proposed biography as nothing more than "an obscure book put out by an academic press in England." He is, as we see in one chapter, not much of a writer himself; and in case we had any doubts about that, Coetzee puts into his mouth the philistine aside that "changing the form" of the book "should have no effect on the content." Four of the five interviews he conducts are with women - two lovers, a cousin and the mother of a former student; thus Coetzee's innate inability to connect with women becomes one of the book's central themes, and on that subject the author of "Summertime," speaking through these figures from his own past, is unsparing. "There was an air of seediness about him," says Julia, a married therapist who initiates an affair with the 30-ish Coetzee more or less out of revenge against her unfaithful husband, "an air of failure. ... In his lovemaking I now think there was an autistic quality." The student's mother - a widowed Brazilian dance teacher who at first takes young Coetzee for a pedophile - is no more generous. "I was a woman," she recalls, "and he was a boy. He was a boy as a priest is always a boy until suddenly one day he is an old man." The interviews are bookended by what Vincent tells us are excerpts from Coetzee's notebooks, written during the period in question and unsuccessfully revised some 25 years later. The half-finished excerpts themselves - fragments of memory and anecdote - are like parables from which even the "late" Coetzee himself was unable to extract the meaning. Even in the notebooks, he does not grant himself the subjectivity of the first person; and if this is a manifestation of the dry repression that others found so frustrating and off-putting in Coetzee the man ("disembodied" is one interviewee's word for him), it is also a shrewd technical maneuver by Coetzee the storyteller. There is always something suspect about the mea culpa - particularly in the first person, particularly when one is making art out of it. Thus it is one thing, as Coetzee surely recognizes, for him to write of himself that he was unattractive or awkward or a fool, and quite another to hear such assessments voiced much more credibly by, say, Adriana, the Brazilian widow, with whom Coetzee ultimately becomes so smitten that he enrolls in a dance class she teaches: "He moved as though his body were a horse that he was riding," she remembers contemptuously, "a horse that did not like its rider and was resisting. Only in South Africa did I meet men like that, stiff, intractable, unteachable." Perhaps the novel's most touching moment comes when Vincent reveals to Adriana that a character in one of Coetzee's novels is based on her; she asks Vincent to send her a copy - "interested," she says, laughing, "to see what this man of wood made of me." IT is a truism, of course, that even the most faithful and exacting memoir contains an element of invention; but jadedness does little to cushion one's surprise upon learning - not from the book itself - that much of Coetzee's self-portrait in "Summertime" is substantially falsified. In 1972, far from withering away in the grim suburb of Tokai with his decrepit father, he was already married, with two young children. And his mother, whose loss hangs over the book, did not in fact die until 1985. Why obfuscate such things? What is the purpose of supposing readers' interest in one's own early life only to subvert that interest via manufactured, undergraduate-level coyness about Truth and Setf ? For all its self-deprecations, there is no contesting that the "Scenes From Provincial Life" trilogy is a fundamentally narcissistic project. But the vandalism Coetzee commits upon the easily checked facts of his own life ultimately serves to sharpen a question that does seem genuine, and genuinely self-indicting: Doesn't being a great artist demand, or at least imply, a certain greatness of spirit as well? "Consider," says Julia. "Here we have a man who, in the most intimate of human relations, cannot connect, or can connect only briefly, intermittently. Yet how does he make his living? He makes his living writing reports, expert reports, on intimate human experience. Because that is what novels are about - isn't it? - intimate experience. . . . Doesn't that strike you as odd?" This is the path of the trilogy as a whole: from the author's childish sense of himself as special or chosen to an adulthood where such detachment comes at a much greater cost. Still, it is in keeping with that detachment that the nature of the catharsis Coetzee is pursuing in these "memoirs" is ultimately not personal or confessional at all, but aesthetic. Late in the book, a former faculty colleague from the University of Cape Town named Sophie, with whom Coetzee had an affair ("In all the time I was with him I never had the feeling I was with an exceptional person"), offers - or, more accurately, is made by Coetzee himself to offer - this assessment of the writer whom many, this reviewer among them, would consider the greatest living novelist in English: "I would say that his work lacks ambition. The control of the elements is too tight. Nowhere do you get a feeling of a writer deforming his medium in order to say what has never been said before, which is to me the mark of great writing." That is the prism through which to read not only "Summertime" but most of Coetzee's work from the last decade, certainly since the Nobel: as a series of provocative genre-deformations (the lecture series of "Elizabeth Costello," the triptych-pages of "Diary of a Bad Year," the bizarre procedural fragmentation of this book) made in the interest of bringing his opinion of his own achievements in line with that of the rest of the world. "How can you be a great writer," says Adriana, "if you are just an ordinary little man?" Coetzee may feel it is too late to amend his legacy in the second regard, but even from beyond the fictional grave he is determined to expand upon the first. Jonathan Dee's fifth novel, "The Privileges," will be published next month.
Bookseller Publisher Review
Summertime is the final instalment of 'Scenes from Provincial Life', South African-Australian Nobel laureate Coetzee's superb trilogy of autobiographical novels. Having addressed his Cape Town childhood in Boyhood, and self-imposed exile in London in Youth, Coetzee now focusses on the period 1972-1977, during which time he has published his first novel but is still struggling with his sense of self as a writer. Back in South Africa after years abroad, he shares a rundown cottage in Cape Town with his widowed father, scraping by as a part-time English teacher. Sometimes grimly humorous, mostly just grim, Summertime is masterfully written, unfolding via a series of (fictional) interviews--conducted by a biographer of the 'late' John Coetzee--with significant figures in the author's life. It is as much an exploration of the problematic relationship between fiction and biography as it is a memoir. Indeed, problematic relationships are the meat of Summertime: Coetzee's inability to connect with his father, with women, with human beings in general; his alienation from his own country; and finally his difficulties with writing itself. This is a gratifying conclusion to Coetzee's trilogy and can be highly recommended as a cerebral but compulsively readable experiment in autobiography. David Cohen is a Melbourne writer, reviewer and former ISBN agency employee
Guardian Review
At some point during the past couple of years, an eminent South African writer now living in Australia wrote this dismissive appraisal of John Maxwell Coetzee's oeuvre: "In general, I would say that his work lacks ambition. The control of the elements is too tight. Nowhere do you get a feeling of a writer deforming his medium in order to say what has never been said before, which is to me the mark of great writing. Too cool, too neat, I would say. Too easy. Too lacking in passion." Even when a writer has achieved international fame and won the biggest trophies - the Nobel and two Booker prizes, in Coetzee's case - a bad review can't be easy to stomach. Harder if it is not just your book that is criticised, but the premise on which you have built your life: namely, that you can, must and should write. Worse still, if the reviewer impugns your character along with your novels. It sounds hurtful, and perhaps it is, although the novelist who wrote it was JM Coetzee. The bad meta-review of Coetzee comes out of the mouth of one of the characters in Coetzee's new book, Summertime , which is about Coetzee. Summertime is full of harsh reviews of Coetzee by Coetzee, of Coetzee the writer and Coetzee the man. The critics are four women, all once loved by "John Coetzee", the Coetzee character, three of them loving him back, in different ways. Another says: ". . . to my mind, a talent for words is not enough if you want to be a great writer. You have also to be a great man. And he was not a great man. He was a little man, an unimportant little man . . . How can you be a great writer if you are just an ordinary little man?" Coetzee built his literary reputation on the eight novels he published between 1974 and 1999. None was less than unusually good, but three in particular have carried his work into the realm of lasting things. The first was Waiting for the Barbarians , a parable about the use of falsely imagined enemies for social control. Substitute "terrorists" for "barbarians" and you have a history of Britain and America since 2001. (Coetzee's book came out in 1980.) Coetzee won the Booker with his fourth novel, Life and Times of Michael K , an eerily colour-blind account of its eponymous hero's odyssey from the city to the wilderness and back in a South Africa enduring an imaginary war. A third masterwork, Disgrace , won him the second Booker. Coetzee took off his skin to write the almost unbearably truthful story of a white lecturer who takes sexual advantage of a student, is disgraced and goes to his daughter in the country, where she is gang-raped. The fact that the rapists are black, and that the up-and-coming black farm worker who lives close to his daughter isn't cooperative in catching them, provoked anger in the upper echelons of South Africa's post-apartheid government. Coetzee emigrated to Australia in 2002, although it is not clear whether this was because of the new South African order. Since Disgrace , the nature of Coetzee's project has changed. He has moved away from naturalistic, storytelling fiction towards other forms - essays, polemic and memoir, or a composite of all three in a fictional framework. It is ironic that a writer with an undeserved reputation for being a recluse (Coetzee doesn't like giving interviews) seems to be taking less interest in the storytelling keel of his books and is inviting us instead to listen in to an intimate conversation he is having with himself, in the form of multiple alter egos. One is a character type who crops up in Coetzee's novels, a type that has served western male writers of the last half century well, from Saul Bellow to Michel Houellebecq: the learned, sceptical man in middle years, unsure whether the lust for life and love that continues to course through him is a curse or a benison. The magistrate in Waiting for the Barbarians and David Lurie in Disgrace are two such. Another is Coetzee's female alter ego, Elizabeth Costello, an elderly, scholarly, world-weary novelist whose stern moral principles are provoked more by fear of death than by belief. ("She is by no means a comforting writer," Coetzee writes of her in his 2003 novel, Elizabeth Costello . "She is even cruel, in a way that women can be, but men seldom have the heart for.") Coetzee's third literary alter ego is Coetzee himself. Summertime is the third of his fictionalised memoirs. Boyhood , published in 1997, tells of his rural childhood in the parched grandeur of the Karoo, in the west of South Africa, and Youth , which came out seven years ago, is an account of a hesitant coming of age into writership in Cape Town and London in the yet-to-swing 60s. In the two earlier memoirs/novels, John, whose life closely follows what we know of the writer's actual biography, is portrayed in the third person as an obsessive self-questioner. He oscillates between contempt for himself and wild ambition. He is frantic for intimacy with others, but ambivalent about it when it comes - is it love? Power? Duty? Curiosity? These gem-like books - small, hard, glittering with piercing image and feeling - are narrated in the present tense, not the present tense of fake immediacy, but the present tense of recurring dreams. In Summertime , Coetzee uses a more novelistic structure. He imagines that his doppelganger died just as he was about to write a sequel to Boyhood and Youth , covering his return to South Africa from the US in the 70s. He left notebooks - we are shown extracts - which suggest that, had he lived, this fictional Summertime would have been written in the same style as the earlier memoir-novels. Now an academic, Mr Vincent, who has never met John, is writing an account of that period of the writer's life, using the notebooks and interviews with five people who were close to him. On the page, it is less complicated than it sounds. The interviews, which take place in 2007 and 2008, are the bulk of the book. The fifth interviewee, the only man, contributes little. The other four are Julia Frankl, a housewife who had an affair with John, and is now a psychotherapist in Canada; Margot Jonker, the Coetzee character's cousin and childhood sweetheart; Adriana Nascimento, a Brazilian dancer whom the Coetzee character fell for, but who rejected him; and Sophie Denoel, a French academic who had an affair with the Coetzee character while they were teaching at the University of Cape Town. The intaglio Coetzee who emerges from the women's accounts is an unprepossessing figure, cold, awkward, remote, stubborn, foolish. He is scruffy and unattractive, physi cally, emotionally and intellectually. He is rude, bold when he should be discreet, withdrawn when he should be passionate. He has wispy hair, a scraggly beard and bad clothes. He is an unromantic loser, living with his old father in a rundown cottage, single, childless and poor. He's an ordinary failure, a bad lover. "In his lovemaking, I now think there was an autistic quality. I offer this not as a criticism but as a diagnosis," Julia tells Mr Vincent. "Two inscrutable automata having inscrutable commerce with each other's bodies: that was how it felt to be in bed with John." She describes how John believed that Schubert had distilled sex into music, and obliged her to make love in time to a Schubert string quartet, saying that she would find out "what it felt like to make love in post-Bonaparte Austria". Adriana suggests the interviewer call his book about John "The Wooden Man". Sophie, the last interviewee, is the most laconically damning: "He had no special sensitivity that I could detect, no original insight into the human condition," she tells Mr Vincent. Even cousin Margot, who has a sisterly affection for John and defends him from the suspicion of his other country relatives, calls him "an alleenloper , as some male animals are: a loner. Perhaps it is as well that he has not married." The line is a reminder of how far Summertime is a fictive construct. Not only is the real Coetzee alive as I write, and I hope will long remain so; by the time the real Coetzee went back to South Africa in 1971, he was married with two children. His first wife, Philippa Jubber, died in 1991, long after they were divorced; his son Nicolas died in 1989. Of these stories, there are no traces in Summertime Nonetheless, it would be fatuous to pretend that John is not in most ways the actual Coetzee's proxy. He shares the name, the fame, the book titles, the CV; John follows Coetzee like Wenceslas's page stepping into the king's footprints in the snow. Why is Coetzee so hard on himself? Is it for comedy? He can make his Johns very funny, with their Don Quixote-like personal codes of conduct and their Woody Allenish neuroses about sex and status. The "Schubert as sublimated coitus" era is there to be laughed with, like the sequence in Boyhood where John pretends to be a Catholic at school and ends up being both subjected to antisemitism and accused of apostasy because he doesn't go to mass. "John Coetzee was actually quite funny. A figure of comedy," says Julia. But that doesn't explain the all-encompassing disdain of John that Coetzee puts into the mouths of his ex-loves. Nor is Coetzee's portrait of the autist as a young man merely self-indulgent compliment-fishing, a rehearsal of a classic biographical device, the ugly duckling story. After all, the women of Summertime are not appraising John's thirtysomething self to contrast it respectfully with his present grandeur. They are talking now; they know his stature, the honours heaped upon him. Their words are as much obituary as biography, and the obituary is an unusually brutal one. I don't believe Coetzee had a choice here. If he hadn't run the risk of seeming self-indulgent, he wouldn't have been able to capture an essential truth about "great men" - that the women who reject them in the early days are not necessarily blind to their potential. A woman who chooses not to sacrifice her life to the kind of selfish, cranky, vain, obsessive, unstable slobs who tend to become "great men" may be making a wise decision. Books, like people, must be judged for what they are, not what they do, and Summertime is a sincere, unsparing attempt by a writer in his late 60s to imagine how a man like him would have appeared, in his early 30s, to women like the women he loved then; and how they might remember him now. The women's toughness towards their subject, their insistence that their reluctantly provided accounts of him are their own stories rather than Coetzee's, has the force of truth. "I really was the main character. John really was a minor character," insists Julia. Her story is, to her, an account of her escape, at the age of 26, from erotic triteness, a dull marriage and the cynical mores of middle-class white Cape Town in the 70s, where husbands "wanted the wives of other men to succumb to their advances but they wanted their own wives to remain chaste - chaste and alluring". John may, she admits, have allowed her to glimpse "the possibility of growth without end in the realm of the erotic", but he is only a portal, and she walks through it. As lovers, they are truly together, body and soul, only once. "John was not my prince . . . how very unlikely it was that he could have been a prince, a satisfactory prince, to any maiden on earth." Adriana, the dancer, has a more visceral reaction to John's attempts to woo her and to his intellectual seduction of her daughter (he teaches her English at a local school). John's hopeless courtship includes an abortive barbecue - it rains - and efforts in Adriana's dance classes. She rejects the very language of his body. "He moved as though his body were a horse that he was riding, a horse that did not like its rider and was resisting." Remembering the time of John - "a brief, one-sided infatuation that never grew into anything" - Adriana expresses loathing for his efforts to win her, and contempt that he gave up so easily. She is so vehement that the reader forgets the real Coetzee is in control of it all; piling on the invective against his alter ego until it seems, finally, that Adriana protests too much, and that the mooncalf did, after all, leave a faint mark on her heart. Of John's women, the tenderest towards him is his cousin, Margot, who provokes a kind of tenderness in return that Julia, Adriana and Sophie did not see. But even Margot has to endure John quoting Waiting for Godot at her when she asks him to tell her a story; and even Margot "cannot imagine her cousin giving himself wholeheartedly to anyone". The modern reader may admire John for his principles, for his insistence on doing "kaffir work" - manual labour such as laying concrete that white South Africans never do - and for his vegetarianism; but any lingering idea that John was a lifelong fighter for majority rule in South Africa gets short shrift from Sophie. "As long as liberation meant national liberation, the liberation of the black nation of South Africa, John had no interest in it," she says. "The liberation struggle was just, but the new South Africa toward which it strove was not utopian enough for him." What, the interviewer asks, would have been utopian enough? "The closing down of the mines. The ploughing under of the vineyards. The disbanding of the armed forces. The abolition of the automobile. Universal vegetarianism. Poetry in the streets. That sort of thing." Coetzee has long been interested in the concept of the double. One of the requirements for a novelist is to be able to split his or her consciousness, to simultaneously be the fabricator of a character and that character's observer. It is a short step from there for the writer to see his own worldly persona, his striving, compromised social self, as a character distinct from the shy, confused, guilty recluse who takes up occupation in his head when he is alone. Dostoyevsky's short novel The Double , where a clerk finds himself edged out of society by another man identical to him in every respect except that he is popular and clubbable, can be read as just such a text: the writer standing back and watching the grotesque spectacle of himself being successful in public, him and yet not him. Dostoyevsky is a hero to Coetzee. When Coetzee was awarded his Nobel prize in 2003, instead of making a speech, he read out a short story, a strange, allusive tale called "He and His Man", ostensibly about Robinson Crusoe and Daniel Defoe, but really about doubles, about a character and his creator, a recluse and his busy, worldly reflection; how they were close, yet could never meet. The Nobel performance itself was a sort of doubling. "Here you see JM Coetzee, the silver-haired old fellow who joins you for dinner," it seemed to say. "Yet that isn't the Coetzee you are giving a prize to; you are giving a prize to Coetzee the writer, who perforce cannot be here. I shall read you some of his work." Confession is another old preoccupation of Coetzee's, and through his double, John, the memoirs are replete with confessional moments. Two shameful childhood actions - pulling the leg off a locust and leaving his cousin to kill it, and secretly scratching his father's beloved recording of Italian opera with a razor - have haunted him ever since. Indeed, there is a sense in which Summertime , more than the two earlier memoirs, is part of a sequence of transgression, confession, penitence and absolution. That sequence comes up in an essay Coetzee wrote in 1985, "Confession and Double Thoughts". In it he is disappointed by the didactic moralism of the late Tolstoy; finds Rousseau's ur-autobiography, The Confessions , to be the work of a cynic who knew that the promotional value of exposing his petty sins outweighed the shame of revealing them; and points out that Dostoyevsky doesn't believe secular confession works. You can confess only to God. "The end of confession," Coetzee concludes, "is to tell the truth to and for oneself." He doesn't offer a prescription for that. But his essay brings up the possibility that both an author and his character may not know the truth about themselves; which leads, in Coetzee's case, to the possibility of setting out to make fictions in the hope that, in the discourse between his unreliable self and the unreliable char acter he has created, he may perceive some truth. "What is the one theme that keeps recurring from book to book?" Julia asks the interviewer in Summertime , referring to John Coetzee's work. "It is that the woman doesn't fall in love with the man." Certainly Coetzee's novels are about love between men and women, but so are most novels. The common thread that leaps out of Coetzee's work is not so much the gulf between men and women as the gulf between two incompatible life paths, the path of surrender and the path of appetites. Again and again, his books put these two ways of living in opposition: one character will be passionate, lusty, engaged, hungry, while the other will be austere, self-denying, detached, finding virtue in deserts and silence and small things. David Lurie and his daughter in Disgrace ; Paul Rayment and Elizabeth Costello in Slow Man ; the concentration camp doctor and Michael K in Life and Times of Michael K . Or, to use examples Coetzee has used, Byron and Jesus. One way of reading Summertime is as a confession, an acknowledgement to women Coetzee has loved, of this double nature. The Byron in John pulls him towards women and engagement in worthy causes, the Jesus in him pulls him away. "His life project was to be gentle," says Julia of John; but goes on to say that this was why she couldn't stay with him. In one of Summertime's most poignant (and, from Coetzee's point of view, self-accusatory) passages, Adriana, whose husband is dying after having his face smashed in with an axe while working as a security guard, asks why John could not have been a "facilitator" for her and her children, instead of a self-conscious Byron-Christ wannabe; instead of leaving her to cope with an alien bureaucracy alone: "Sometimes, you know, I would be trudging the streets of that ugly, windy city from one government office to another and I would hear this little cry come from my throat, yi-yi-yi, so soft that no one around me could hear. I was in distress. I was like an animal calling out in distress." It would be a cold reader who would falter here and ask who Adriana really is in Coetzee's post-modernist house of doubles: is she a real person? Is she made up? This is one of the moments in Coetzee's work where something stirs; where an expression succeeds which very rarely appears in English-language literature, and tends to sound off-key when it does - an expression of love which is not love for a person, but a tenderness, an empathy, with the very idea of life itself. How brave any creature is, just to live. Summertime is published by Harvill Secker (pounds 17.99). To order a copy for pounds 16.99 with free UK p&p call Guardian book service on 0330 333 6846. Caption: article-coetzee.1 It sounds hurtful, and perhaps it is, although the novelist who wrote it was JM Coetzee. The bad meta-review of Coetzee comes out of the mouth of one of the characters in Coetzee's new book, Summertime , which is about Coetzee. Summertime is full of harsh reviews of Coetzee by Coetzee, of Coetzee the writer and Coetzee the man. Dostoyevsky is a hero to Coetzee. When Coetzee was awarded his Nobel prize in 2003, instead of making a speech, he read out a short story, a strange, allusive tale called "He and His Man", ostensibly about Robinson Crusoe and Daniel Defoe, but really about doubles, about a character and his creator, a recluse and his busy, worldly reflection; how they were close, yet could never meet. The Nobel performance itself was a sort of doubling. "Here you see JM Coetzee, the silver-haired old fellow who joins you for dinner," it seemed to say. "Yet that isn't the Coetzee you are giving a prize to; you are giving a prize to Coetzee the writer, who perforce cannot be here. I shall read you some of his work." "What is the one theme that keeps recurring from book to book?" [Julia Frankl] asks the interviewer in Summertime , referring to [John Coetzee]'s work. "It is that the woman doesn't fall in love with the man." Certainly Coetzee's novels are about love between men and women, but so are most novels. The common thread that leaps out of Coetzee's work is not so much the gulf between men and women as the gulf between two incompatible life paths, the path of surrender and the path of appetites. Again and again, his books put these two ways of living in opposition: one character will be passionate, lusty, engaged, hungry, while the other will be austere, self-denying, detached, finding virtue in deserts and silence and small things. [David Lurie] and his daughter in Disgrace ; Paul Rayment and [Elizabeth Costello] in Slow Man ; the concentration camp doctor and Michael K in Life and Times of Michael K . Or, to use examples Coetzee has used, Byron and Jesus. - James Meek.
Kirkus Review
Defiantly inconclusive some-kind-of-fiction from Booker- and Nobel Prizewinning Coetzee (Diary of a Bad Year, 2007, etc.). Navel-gazing reached new heights in the recent work of this South Africanborn, now Australian-resident writer. The good news is that his latest novel, closely related to the earlier autobiographies Boyhood (1997) and Youth (2002), is much more engaging than its recent predecessors dominated by the presence and influence of Coetzee's (really) annoying surrogate Elizabeth Costello. She isn't consulted during the parade of interviews conducted here by would-be biographer Mr. Vincent with five people who knew the late (!) eminent and notoriously reclusive writer "John Coetzee." The period investigated is the 1970s, when fictional Coetzee, retreating from an embryonic and unfulfilling academic/literary career abroad, returned to live in Cape Town with his widowed father. We learn that John's affair with a vigorous married woman couldn't survive her growing conviction that he "did not love anybody, was not built for love," that "sex with him lacked all thrill." The cousin he had loved when both were children later found him unsociable and emotionless. Brazilian dance teacher Adriana and former colleague Sophie failed similarly to achieve intimacy with John, and another colleague, Martin J, pronounces the fictional Coetzee's withdrawal symptomatic of his fear of human connection. Numerous distancing devices (e.g., Mr. Vincent's reshaping of Margot's disjointed responses into a coherent narrative) call into question everything "revealed" to the interviewer, while calmly keeping the reader at arm'sand mind'slength. The result is a fascinating hybrid, weakened only by Mr. Vincent's pace-killing interruptions, that becomes simultaneously enlightening and amusingly evasive. The real Coetzee's austere integrity and terse candor make this the best yet of his ongoing self-interrogations. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
In a clever and compelling new novel, Coetzee (Disgrace) probes the life of late South African novelist John Coetzee, whom a young English biographer has begun researching. Coetzee draws on fragments from his own journals to tell the story of a writer. Sandwiched between the journal excerpts are interviews with five people-his cousin Margot, a married woman with whom Coetzee had an affair, a dancer whose young daughter Coetzee taught English, a university colleague, and Martin, a man with whom Coetzee had competed for a university position. From these perspectives, the writer emerges as an introspective loner whose lack of concern for others (demonstrated by his inability to care compassionately for his father, who lives with him) verges on misanthropy. His complete misunderstanding of the workings of the human heart generates writing that is technically playful but dispassionate, yet this distance allows him to peer into the human psyche in ways that others cannot. Verdict Anyone captivated by the themes of distraction and the search for home that characterize the writings of Kafka, W.G. Sebald, Milan Kundera, and Philip Roth will want to travel with Coetzee on this journey toward home. Another brilliant excursion into the nature of writing and the complexities of place and the making of a personal identity. [See Prepub Alert, LJ 9/15/09.]-Henry L. Carrigan Jr., Evanston, IL (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
