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.
BOOK REVIEWS
BookBrowse
Though it may strike an odd note of praise, the most admirable quality of J.M. Coetzee's Summertime is the author's monastic restraint. As the novel develops through a disjoint series of interviews with characters from the early career of the now famous writer J.M. Coetzee, practically every page calls out for the real Coetzee to break the fourth wall of narration and intervene on his hapless hero's behalf. No such intrusion is forthcoming. Instead, we play rapt audience to lovers, family and colleagues whose recollections painstakingly depict the fictional Coetzee as a calamitous failure of a human being, unable to make contact through the walls of his genius... More than just an academic exercise in meta-fiction, this is an understated yet riveting portrait of the artist as a young man. (Reviewed by Micah Gell-Redman). Full Review (968 words).
Media Reviews
Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. 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.
Kirkus Reviews
Starred Review. ... 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.
Library Journal
Starred Review. Another brilliant excursion into the nature of writing and the complexities of place and the making of a personal identity.
Los Angeles Times
[H]ere is Coetzee's ingenious contrivance: his female characters are more real, more palpable, than the ghost-figure who stands in for him. Ingenious, yes; except that the protagonist's refusal to protagonize falls as a dulling, tedious burden on what is more a novelized argument than a novel.
New York Times
[T]he 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?
Globe and Mail (UK)
Summertime contains a breeze of poetic Coetzeean prose that virtually reads itself; for this and its clever conceit, its shell-bound criticism, the book is worth encountering.
Globe and Mail (UK) Summertime contains a breeze of poetic Coetzeean prose that virtually reads itself; for this and its clever conceit, its shell-bound criticism, the book is worth encountering.
Guardian (UK) Summertime is both an elegant request that the sum of Coetzee's existence as a public figure should be looked for only in his writing, and ample evidence, once again, why that request should be honoured.
The London Times (UK)
[A]n imaginatively distorted and distorting portrait of the artist as outsider.
The Independent (UK)
... a subtle, allusive meditation: an intriguing map of a weak character's constricted heart struggling against the undertow of suspicion within South Africa's claustrophobic, unpoetic, overtly macho society.
Telegraph (UK)
The cumulative effect of Coetzee’s unblinking honesty and his never-wavering artistic seriousness, is an understanding of the creation of a great writer.
Recent Reader Reviews
Rated of 5
by Bonnie Brody Biography of a Living Writer - Supposedly Written After His Death This is a wonderful book. John Coetzee writes a 'biography' of himself that supposedly has been written after his death. The biographer interviews family members, old lovers and colleagues of Coetzee. What comes out repeatedly is that Coetzee was... Read More
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(968 words).
Los Angeles Times
of 5
by Bonnie Brody
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