Summertime: Fiction (Scenes from Provincial Life)

Before writing this review, I did something I rarely do: I read other reviews of the book. What seems faintly amusing from them is an apparent mindset by reviewers regarding the relationship of authors to their fictional works. England's Guardian newspaper wonders if Summertime - a fiction in which Coetzee is the principal character - is not an act of evasive action, i.e. an attempt by Coetzee to obfuscate his life. Others sense something afoot with this book that they can't put finger to. So they step gingerly around what might seem autobiographical revelations.A wise move, such wariness. It's indeed tempting to attach the word "cagey" to Coetzee, but I propose that "inventive" may be the more accurate descriptive, although certainly less alluring. Think of a pair of his recent books:In Diary Of A Bad Year, Coetzee weaves a seeming series of crank essays on a number of topical subjects into an "almost" romance between an aging writer and his young typist. Elizabeth Costello gives us another snapshot of an elder writer, this time a woman, bent on assessing the world around her. As part of her assessment she can't escape the notion that her fame as a writer has long since outdistanced the reality of who she is.Seeing some similarities, despite the differing characterizations and novel structure? Don't be deceived here: wariness is still the watchword regarding Coetzee and his relationship to his writing. But I'm going to throw that word aside and make my own stab at what Coetzee is - and has been - up to in his more recent novels.But first a word or two about this story:In Summertime, Coetzee has died and a man named Vincent is researching for a biography of Coetzee. As part of his research, he's selected five people from Coetzee's life to interview.* Julia, a married woman with whom Coetzee has had an affair while in his early to middle years* His cousin Margot* A Brazilian dancer whom Coetzee knew indirectly - Coetzee was for a time her daughter's tutor.* Martin, a university colleague of Coetzee's, and...* Sophie, a French woman with whom Coetzee had a sexual liaison in his early life.Among the topics discussed in these interviews are:* Coetzee's lack of social graces* His lackluster performances as a sexual partner* His possible homosexuality* His abilities as a writer* His successes - or lack thereof - as a tutor and teacherClearly, some of these interviews unearth accurate biographical bon mots. But which? Beware! Okay, I step into literary quicksand here.These are my contentions:* Coetzee is first and foremost a novelist of great stylistic inventiveness. While his prose may seem pedestrian to some, that's not where his talent and vision lie. Birthed as a writer in the crucible of South Africa and that nation's checkered history, he has rarely written directly about that nation's history. In fact, his writing on the subject, as with other subjects he treats, is somewhat oblique. He prefers metaphor and symbol to the real, the tangible.* Coetzee has embraced the postmodern tone and style, although I wouldn't term his work as mainstream (yes, this adjective is laughable) postmodernism. The aspects of postmodernism he has appropriated for his own use tend toward the deconstructive. They also minimize the autonomy of the author and take a view of both history and fiction as a blend of the real and the imagined.* I suspect, then, that he's been trying for a decade to construct a legacy to bear his name. I also suspect he wants this legacy to be one of literary adventurousness regarding style and structure. And I believe he would want to minimize his personality in such a legacy. Hardly the manner of Hemingway or Mailer, right?In this light, Summertime seems to be a subtle witticism on both his life and fame, one in which he wishes to reduce his role to the minimal, leaving only an authorial representation something akin to Gollum in The Lord Of The Rings trilogy.But this review isn't to be construed as all about Coetzee, or the anti-Coetzee. With Summertime, he's constructed one of the most skillful and readable novels of his career. I think this laudable to the nth degree. In an age in which so much poetry and memoir is self-absorbed, Coetzee seems to be leaving us with a maxim we readers and writers should forever hold close to our hearts: the story's the thing.

This is the most sheerly enjoyable book Coetzee has produced in ages. After the somewhat arid self-referentiality of  SLOW MAN  and  DIARY OF A BAD YEAR , I admit to being nervous about this one. A series of interviews with people who had known Coetzee in his thirties, conducted by a British academic after the writer's supposed death -- how self-referential can you get? And yet I was wrong, completely wrong. Postmodern deconstruction this may be, but the result is a radiant collection of characters and stories whose humanity and humor seasons the more serious concerns that have occupied Coetzee all his life.The "John Coetzee" of the novel is significantly different from J. M. Coetzee the novelist, less successful, unmarried, a shy bachelor living with his aging father in a broken-down cottage in a Cape Town suburb. He is presented as something of a failure in everything except his writing, his slightly comic image not at all the picture that a famous man would normally project. The book begins with a selection from "his" journals, mainly on political matters. I say "his" in quotes, first because the opinions of this version of the author are not necessarily those of the author himself, and second because they are already in the process of being turned into something else. "What Coetzee writes there cannot be trusted, not as a factual record -- not because he was a liar but because he was a fictioneer," says the interviewer to one of the characters. To which she replies: "But what if we are all fictioneers, as you call Coetzee? What if we all continually make up the stories of our lives?" Indeed; and that is precisely what we see Coetzee doing here, what any writer does.Most of the book is only secondarily about Coetzee at all. The longest sections are interviews with three women whom he loved in different ways. Each tells her own story which is primarily about her rather than about John, each standing on its own as a piece of short fiction. There is a first-person confession from Julia, a married woman with whom John had an affair; her few months with the writer become merely a chapter in the longer history of her marriage. Next is Margot, a cousin whom John came to love during holidays as children on the vast family farm in the Karoo. Here the narrative shifts from the first to the third person (shades of Paul Auster, who does the same thing in  INVISIBLE ), and includes numerous lines in Afrikaans. The effect is to paint both cousins' deep but impractical affection for their native land. As Margot says of herself, "This landscape, this 'kontrei,' has taken over her heart. When she dies and is buried, she will dissolve into this earth so naturally it will be as if she never had a human life." For both the real and fictional Coetzees, it is not so simple; indeed the writer is now a citizen of Australia. With the third interviewee, there yet another shift in attitude. For Adriana, a Brazilian dancer and the mother of a teenage girl whom he is tutoring in English, is the one correspondent who has no time for John either as a teacher, writer, or would-be lover; her narrowly snobbish views make this the most richly comic story of the five.The last two interviews, both with colleagues at the University of Cape Town, are briefer and less personal. Here we move away from character back to the world of ideas. We learn more about John Coetzee as a teacher (earnest but not inspired) and a political figure (less engaged than the real writer seems to have been), but personal matters are kept out of sight. The fifth correspondent, a Frenchwoman named Sophie, admits that she and John had a liaison, but refuses to give details. After the frankness of the first half, I admit to a disappointed feeling that the connecting thread was close to breaking. The final section of the book, like the opening, is another set of journal fragments, which seems to break off in mid-air. But it ends on a human note -- John's problem of what to do about his housebound father. The emotion may have leached out of the main part of the book, but is this a sign of a hidden spring in the desert of this hitherto reticent character?

Summertime was my first Coetzee novel and I enjoyed it, once I'd got some sort of a handle on how the narrative twists and loops, undercutting the narrator and questioning intent.It's not a wholly easy book but it was certainly worthwhile. The narrative is framed by a narrator, ostensibly trying to compile a biography of Coetzee through interviews with those who he had met. The Coetzee of the narrative is shown up in all his bizarre shortcomings, with women talking of his inadequacies and inability to communicate. However, the Coetzee shown in the text is clearly different from Coetzee the writer - most obviously in that the latter is still alive.The way in which the narrative is built, interviews and recollections with the fictional Coetzee, makes one consider the means by which stories are built - is this an autobiography discovered as a biography or a novel disguised as a biography? This "constructedness" is initially a hurdle that makes it somewhat daunting to take on but, ultimately, it seems incredibly rich through this layering.Although this makes it sound quite po-faced, I found many parts of Summertime engrossing and humourous. The last section of the novel, fragments of the ostensible Coetzee's journal, are also incredibly moving, serving to highlight the shortcomings of the pseudo-narrator and the strengths of the real deal when he's not hiding behind the third-person facade.

This book was un-put-downable. The style of writing draws the reader in and creates a world that is believable. At times it could have verged on solipsism and self-indulgence but it is saved from this by the representation of the protagonist. Loved it.

Not what i expected , it is reading for our book group, bit worried about the sex in it. They said they didn't mind!I was in South Africa at that time the book was written, so very interesting to read about the 1970s on ward.Would recomend it as a good read.

A really brave book. A very difficult concept to make work but Coetzee pulls it off. It the the combination of integrity and Coetzee's skill as a writer that makes this a very special book. It stretches the concept of 'the novel' almost to the limit. But it's a page turner - amazingly given how dour and dry it is and how fragmented the form. One I will definitely read again.

Impossible for John Coetzee not to create something new, something amazing, something you'll read over and over again to find new delight. This is the third volume of Coetzee's 'autobiographical' writings and shows the writer as a relatively young adult returned to Cape Town after years in the UK and USA, to stay with his elderly father and begin his career as a writer and try to find a job. It is the time he wrote and published his first novel 'Dusk Lands' (1974). But again, it is an unusual form of autobiography to say the least. Not only is Coetzee very harsh on himself, as he was in 'Boyhood' (1997) and 'Youth' (2002), both written in the 3d person. But now the 3d person writing has acquired a new dimension: 'Summer Time' consists of 'interviews' of five people close to Coetzee at the time, four women (a married lover, a favourite cousin, an outrageous Brazilian he fell desperately in love with, a French colleague lecturer at the University of Cape Town) and one man of few words, a colleague and long time friend. The 'interviews' are conducted by a fictional biographer after the (fictional)'famous writer's death' and based on the latter's notebooks which surface from time to time. Five different views on a lonely, socially more than awkward Coetzee in his twenties in a context of the weird white society under apartheid in which Coetzee with his mixed Afrikaner and English ancestry can find no foothold. Nor does he want to. He will stay a lonely, socially awkward, stubborn man his whole life and here one can see why. But apart from his usual writing genius, this book is particularly fascinating - one could say 'spicy' - because it is Coetzee himself who imagines and writes the different views and insights, expressed in different styles by very different people/characters. Thereby he gives a multilayered yet distant view of himself as if examining his image in a number of distorting mirrors much like children love to do, sometimes bursting out laughing, sometimes pensive, wondering if this is 'me'.Autobiography usually expresses the writer's view of the self. Coetzee obviously doesn't feel too keen on that (although fortunately he judges the times and contexts he has lived and what they did to him important and special enough to share). But in this book he goes further. 'Summer Time' becomes a reflection on how we are each defined by the outside views of others on us. Views based on their own personalities and circumstances and often irritatingly superficial or self projecting. Where is the self? Is there something like the self after all? One would think that a creative loner like Coetzee would believe in a self borne self. But does he? While reading, one sometimes feels yes, he must feel misunderstood. And then again: no... The kind of dialectics that make for excellence in literature.'Summer Time' is shortlisted for the Booker prize which Coetzee was the first writer to win twice (1983, 1999). If he wins again this year, he will be the first to win the prestigious prize three times.