Product Description

A young English biographer is working on a book about the late writer, John Coetzee. He plans to focus on the years from 1972-1977 when Coetzee, in his thirties, is sharing a run-down cottage in the suburbs of Cape Town with his widowed father. This, the biographer senses, is the period when he was 'finding his feet as a writer'. Never having met Coetzee, he embarks on a series of interviews with people who were important to him - a married woman with whom he had an affair, his favourite cousin Margot, a Brazilian dancer whose daughter had English lessons with him, former friends and colleagues. From their testimony emerges a portrait of the young Coetzee as an awkward, bookish individual with little talent for opening himself to others. Within the family he is regarded as an outsider, someone who tried to flee the tribe and has now returned, chastened. His insistence on doing manual work, his long hair and beard, rumours that he writes poetry evoke nothing but suspicion in the South Africa of the time. Sometimes heartbreaking, often very funny, "Summertime" shows us a great writer as he limbers up for his task. It completes the majestic trilogy of fictionalised memoir begun with "Boyhood" and "Youth".

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #482 in Books
• Published on: 2009-08-13
• Original language: English
• Binding: Hardcover
• 272 pages

Review
`More tricky autobiographical fiction from the master of the form' --Marie Claire

"The cumulative effect of Coetzee's unblinking honesty and...seriousness, is an understanding of the creation of a great writer" -- Sunday Telegraph Books

`Coetzee, 69, is in a beautifully reflective mood here...Summertime shows...he is an intense outstanding and very enjoyable talent.' -- Scotland on Sunday

`What Summertime offers is a subtle, allusive meditation' -- Financial Times

`Summertime is both an elegant request...and ample evidence, once again, why that request should be honoured'
--The Observer

`A poignant, cubistic portrait...of the artist as outsider.' --TLS

`it represents a way of breaking the genre of the memoir by over- and under-fulfilling its demands at the same time' --New Statesman

`I'm a huge fan and this latest novel has only increased my ardour.' --Radio Times

"Clever, tricky, a redefinition of what fiction is."
--Grazia, Kate Mosse

About the Author
J.M. Coetzee's work includes Waiting For the Barbarians, Life & Times of Michael K, Boyhood, Youth, Disgrace and Diary of a Bad Year. He was the first author to win the Booker Prize twice and was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2003.

Customer Reviews

A portrait of the artist... as a supporting character
Ostensibly, J.M. Coetzee's Summertime is a third instalment of autobiography, succeeding Boyhood (1998) and Youth (2002) (both of which, incidentally, are excellent). But this description belies the book's true nature in two ways. First, Summertime is so far from being a conventional autobiography it's essentially a work of fiction. Second, it's a terrific book in its own right, and can be enjoyed without any prior knowledge of its forerunners.

The book begins in a style resembling Boyhood and Youth. Brief scenes from the life of Coetzee, now a thirtysomething in 1970s apartheid South Africa, are narrated in crisp third-person prose. Coetzee, we learn, is a down-and-out, unemployed and living with his elderly father, disgusted by apartheid but stuck in a rut of inaction verging on paralysis. But each scene stops abruptly, clearly unfinished, and after 15 pages the narrative stops altogether. What's going on? Here emerges the book's central conceit: Coetzee has died, leaving behind notebooks of assorted scraps. A would-be biographer, seeking to reconstruct "the story" of Coetzee's life, interviews a number of people who knew Coetzee at that time, and transcripts of these (fictional) interviews occupy most of the book's remainder.

The interviewees give us little vignettes in which Coetzee is a ghostly figure, a barely-there anonynimity, content to be manipulated and exploited by stronger characters: a man defined by his fleeting and unsatisfying connections to others. He is a supporting character. "I am perfectly aware it is John you want to hear about, not me," says Julia, Coetzee's one-time lover. "But the only story involving John that I can tell, or the only one I am prepared to tell, is this one, namely the story of my life and his part in it, which is quite different, quite another matter, from the story of his life and my part in it."

What a wonderful antidote to most autobiographies, in which the author is the protagonist in "My Story", steering a course through life like a Greek hero at the helm of a ship. Lives aren't like that. And what a remarkable fictional achievement, since, after all, the "interviews" are pure fiction. Coetzee imagines himself as he must have been viewed by others (scruffy, shy, maladroit, and not a bestselling-author-in-waiting), and does so with great perceptiveness and self-effacement, through a skilfully crafted range of utterly convincing other-voices.

John Berger famously wrote that "never again will a single story be told as though it were the only one". In this rich and intelligent work, Coetzee emphasizes that this goes for life stories too.

The Cold Fish Are Jumpin'
Focusing on a five-year period in the seventies, a biographer in 2008/9 has conducted interviews with a handful of people who knew a now-dead writer named 'John Coetzee.' Summertime is made up of transcripts of these interviews and fragments of the dead man's diary-notebooks.

When I think of the phrase 'fictionalised autobiography,' I think of a book in which the story is basically true but utilises some literary devices in order to better tell the tale and perhaps includes a large degree of self-serving embellishment. With this endlessly fascinating new novel, Coetzee twists this so much it is inside out.

He has taken the idea of semi-autobiographical fiction and switched the two halves around, so to speak: he obscures the fiction beneath a veil of fact. He gives his central character his own name, aspects of his history, his nationality and his literary career but other crucial details are not accurate. For example, it is hugely important throughout the novel that the character is unmarried, a loner bordering on asexual, but in fact during the period covered in the book - 1972-77 - he was married and had two young children (according to Wonkipedia anyway (I know, I know.)) The usual question of "how much of the author is in the character?" becomes here "how much of the character is not in the author?" After reading this playful, fertile and surprisingly swift little book your mind will be pregnant with questions: to what extent does the truth behind fiction matter? To what extent can fiction illuminate truth while obscuring it? Can one write one's own life? How much of us is left behind in the minds of others after our physical demise? How truthful would that picture be, and how much would that matter? And on and on. (Of course maybe he just wanted to write his ex-wife out of existence!)

While Coetzee is constructing his playground of dualities - fiction/fact, art/artist, public/private (dichotomizing around, you might say) - it is surely no accident how blackly funny it all is: instead of massaging the reality into a more flattering shape, the version Coetzee creates of 'himself' is certainly not a self-serving one. He uses every opportunity to humiliate 'himself' in the most excruciatingly personal ways, to the point of over-kill. It's as if Charlie Kaufman remade Rashomon. Also interesting is Coetzee's depiction of the time and place (seventies South Africa, as apartheid was itself coming apart though long before it was finally dismantled), but of course the book forces us to question how truthful one man's perspective can be, on himself, his companions and his times.

J.M. Coetzee - Summertime
Coetzee is a literary titan, a giant among writers. His work has a tendency to make other writers' look unambitious (despite what this book claims) and small, their sentences meagre or unsightly flabby. That's my view of his work, anyway. In terms of writing quality, in terms of vision, in terms of sheer cold unwavering focus, Coetzee comes out on top every single time. As does he, recently, in turns of narrative innovation and form. His recent novels have twisted traditional narrative out of shape, reformed the novel. Diary of a Bad Year, in particular, is a completely unique piece, a complete reimagination of the structure of writing a novel. And Summertime, again, is at pains to be perverse: it claims to be a fictionalised autobiography, in which a researcher carries out interviews with acquaintances of the deceased John Coetzee.

Summertime is a strange book. As fictionalised autobiography, it is therefore neither fiction nor biography. And as fiction it lacks narrative, and as biography it is patently incomplete. It is more like a literary artefact, a collection from the archives. It may even be as close to painting a literarture can get. I loved it of course. But if there's one thing Coetzee can do it is make you think.

The picture he creates of the nascent writer Coetzee is a fascinating one. The interviews with his acquaintances make him out to be incompetent with women (though, juding from this and the previous two volumes, he also has surprisingly many for someone so deficient in social nous), awkward at sex, somewhat lacking as a son, and remote as both a friend and relative. And, of course, one never knows if any of these impressions are correct, if any of these people truly existed. This entire exercise may just be a device to get Coetzee to think what he wants us to. Indeed, I got the impression that Coetzee was going a bit far with the cold negativity about himself. After all, he can not know what these characters truly thought of him (or can not, if the relationships he depicts are accurate ones). It seemed a little disingenuous to me. Almost as if Coetzee thinks the idea of a remote, awkward, solitary and socially incompetent writerly soul is romantic, and therefore wrote himself up into this image through his mouthpieces. But, of course, the nagging at your sleeve through every sentence, paragraph, and chapter, must be the thought: "is this really true?" When every episode, spoken word, and thought is in doubt, it leaves you in a very strange relationship with the book you are reading. And never before have I read a book where everything is on such uncertain ground. I felt like I was in uncharted waters (a feeling I've had before with Coetzee, and not often with anyone else).

But what of the whole thing? Coetzee writing is exemplary. His sentence-writing is better than anyone alive. No one can be so hard, cold and clear. The entire book is a complete pleasure from start to end. It's fascinating. And yet because of the fact that you don't know where you are with it, if viewed in a certain way it is quite unsatisfying. And that might well be the relentlessly private Coetzee's message: Try and get to know me, and i'll run rings around you and leave you no better off.

Nonetheless, a wonderful book. It is unquestionably the most accomplished, most intelligent, and best novel on the Booker shortlist. However, that doesn't mean it should or will win (otherwise nearly all Coetzee's novels should have won it). But I'm sure Coetzee doesn't really care.