Summertime Reading Guide & Discussion Questions

Book Club Discussion Questions

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For supplemental discussion material see our Beyond the Book article, J.M. Coetzee and our BookBrowse Review of Summertime.

Please be aware that this discussion guide will contain spoilers!

INTRODUCTION
With Summertime, Nobel Prize-winning novelist J. M. Coetzee has delivered one of the most profound and searching books of his extraordinary career—a meditation on identity and love, an unrelenting exploration of the personal and spiritual costs inherent in the making of art, and a cunning pseudo-autobiography. Coetzee has a reputation as a bold and inventive novelist, and Summertime bears that out in its innovative structure. Rather than a straightforward narrative, the book comprises interviews conducted by Mr. Vincent, a fictional biographer who is writing a book about a deceased writer named John Coetzee. This meta-fictional framing device works brilliantly as Vincent’s successive interlocutors reveal their versions of the man at the center of the book and behind the book. The portrait that emerges from these overlapping perceptions is often shockingly unflattering. The women characters are at times venomous in their contempt for Coetzee’s passivity and detachment. He is called “soft,” “radically incomplete,” “an irritation,” with “something cool or cold about him”; he “did not have a strong presence” and “wasn’t made for love.” When challenged to defend him, even Vincent can only offer weakly that he was “dogged” and “had a steady gaze.” Why, the reader asks, would the author go to such lengths to present such a negative picture? Is he being ruthlessly honest or is there some kind of game being played here? At the very least, a comical figure emerges. Awkward moments of physical and romantic ineptitude show that the author is capable, in his wry way, of laughing at himself even while contemplating mortality and the difficult question of whether we can ever truly know someone else.

DISCUSSION QUESTIONS

1. What do you think about the structure of the novel? Do you believe it’s an effective way of telling this character’s story? Why do you think Coetzee, the author, chose to write the story in this way?
   


2. How close do you think Coetzee the character is to Coetzee the author? Are we to read this as autobiography?
   


3. Which of the five interviewees do you think knew Coetzee the best? Who had the most insight into the man?
   

Unless otherwise stated, this discussion guide is reprinted with the permission of Penguin Books. Any page references refer to a USA edition of the book, usually the trade paperback version, and may vary in other editions.