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More copies of this ISBNThis title in other editionsSummertimeby J. M. Coetzee
Staff Pick
As a work shortlisted for the 2009 Booker Prize, much has already been made about Summertime. It is being billed as the third volume of Coetzee's autobiographical Scenes from Provincial Life (after Boyhood and Youth), yet is not mentioned as being such anywhere on the dust jacket or title page of the American edition. While the first two volumes were clear examples of creative nonfiction, Summertime is a work of fiction (however many autobiographical elements it may or may not contain). The book begins from the premise that Coetzee himself has already passed away and an interviewer attempting to write a critical portrait of the author's life is left to track down surviving individuals who knew him best (colleagues, a former lover, a cousin). The main body of the book is comprised of five of these fictional interviews, and each portrays Coetzee as an altogether unremarkable, shy, emotionally stunted, and loveless man. Yet for those at all familiar with J. M. Coetzee's life, they will notice some obvious factual liberties employed in the writing of Summertime. For example, the Coetzee of the novel is without wife or children, yet in reality, Coetzee was once married and had both a son and a daughter (although his son was killed in an automobile accident in his early 20s). Having read all of Coetzee's fiction, and much of his nonfiction, I was excited to read another autobiographical work in hopes of gaining further insight into this remarkable writer. Yet now, having had some time to reflect upon the book, it almost seems as if I know less about the Nobel laureate than I did before I began. I cannot help but think that this was, perhaps, Coetzee's goal all along. "It would be very, very naive to conclude that because the theme was present in his writing it had to be present in his life," one of the fictional interviewees responds when questioned about how much they thought Coetzee's fiction reflected his real life. Another offers, "He was just a man, a man of his time, talented, maybe even gifted, but, frankly, not a giant....from other people who knew him you will get a different picture, I am sure." Coetzee, well known to be a private, if not reclusive, individual, attended neither of the Booker Prize banquets at which he was to receive his award. For a man who appears to value his privacy greatly, it would seem somewhat contradictory for him to write a traditional autobiography that dispels decades of rumors and speculative judgments. Hence, we are instead offered Summertime, described on the book's jacket as: ...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. Perhaps what Coetzee was striving for with Summertime was not so much an autobiographical offering but an affront to those who doggedly pursue the personal details of a man who authors such convincing works. Maybe Summertime is merely an inside joke on Coetzee's behalf, insofar as rather than ignoring ongoing pleas for insight into his personal life, he instead serves up an account of his days commingling fact and fiction wherever he sees fit. By recasting his past in a fictitious future, one is left unable to determine where the threads of truth begin and the tangles of imagination end. Whatever his intent, Summertime is another compelling, layered, richly imagined work by the great literary master. With a command of prose that borders on tactical precision, Coetzee, as always, employs pathos and refined morality to craft a story that is captivating, thought provoking, disquieting, and often humorous. Summertime may confound or frustrate a few of Coetzee's more ardent followers, but only because they could not allow the story to be told as the storyteller himself intended. Consider. Here we have a man who, in the most intimate of human relations, cannot connect, or can connect only briefly, intermittently. Yet how does he make his living? He makes his living writing reports, expert reports, on intimate human experience. Because that is what novels are about — isn't it? — intimate experience. Novels as opposed to poetry or painting. Doesn't that strike you as odd? Recommended by Jeremy, Powell's City of Books Synopses & ReviewsPublisher Comments:A brilliant new work of fiction from the Nobel Prize-winning author of Disgrace and Diary of a Bad Year. 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. Review:"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 Denol, 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." Publishers Weekly (Starred Review) (Copyright Reed Business Information, Inc.) Synopsis:This brilliant new work of fiction from the Nobel Prize-winning author of Disgrace and Diary of a Bad Year allows Coetzee to imagine his own life, revealing painful moral struggles and attempts to come to grips with what it means to care for another human being. About the AuthorBorn in Cape Town, South Africa, on February 9, 1940, John Michael Coetzee studied first at Cape Town and later at the University of Texas at Austin, where he earned a Ph.D. degree in literature. In 1972 he returned to South Africa and joined the faculty of the University of Cape Town. His works of fiction include Dusklands, Waiting for the Barbarians, which won South Africa's highest literary honor, the Central News Agency Literary Award, and the Life and Times of Michael K., for which Coetzee was awarded his first Booker Prize in 1983. He has also published a memoir, Boyhood: Scenes From a Provincial Life, and several essays collections. He has won many other literary prizes including the Lannan Award for Fiction, the Jerusalem Prize and The Irish Times International Fiction Prize. In 1999 he again won Britain's prestigious Booker Prize for Disgrace, becoming the first author to win the award twice in its 31-year history. In 2003, Coetzee was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. What Our Readers Are SayingBe the first to add a comment for a chance to win!Product Details
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