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by Boomert - Summertime by J M Coetzee 06 Jan 2010
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.

This review from Australian Bookseller & Publisher magazine (March 2009, Vol 88, No 6.) is reproduced by kind permission of Thorpe-Bowker, a division of R R Bowker LLC. © Copyright 2009, Thorpe-Bowker.

Author Biography: J.M. Coetzee
J.M. Coetzee's work includes Dusklands, In the Heart of the Country, Waiting for the Barbarians, Life and Times of Michael K - which won the Booker Prize - Foe, Age of Iron, The Master of Petersburg, and the memoir Boyhood: Scenes from Provincial Life. His novel Disgrace won the Booker Prize, making him the first author to have won this prestigious prize twice. His more recent novels include Elizabeth Costello and Slow Man.

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