A rich, funny, and deeply affecting autobiographical new novel from one of the world's greatest living writers.
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.
"Coetzee has always been a writer with a cold eye and here he turns that eye on himself...there is something satisfying in the bleakness, in Coetzee's refusal to present the world other than it appears to him, and to subject his character to this cool, unforgiving analysis." Allan Massie, The Scotsman
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
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.) Copyright 2009 Reed Business Information.
"Coetzee has always been a writer with a cold eye and here he turns that eye on himself...there is something satisfying in the bleakness, in Coetzee's refusal to present the world other than it appears to him, and to subject his character to this cool, unforgiving analysis." Allan Massie, The Scotsman
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