Customer Reviews

Summertime: Fiction

5 star:		(22)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(5)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

This was a strong contender for the 2009 Man Booker Prize. Many felt it didn't have a chance because Coetzee had already won two Bookers. I certainly preferred Summertime to the Man Booker winner, Wolf Hall.

This is the third in a series that began with Boyhood and continued with Youth. The first two books were fictional biographies of writer John Coetzee and were told in the third person but with insight into Coetzee's thoughts. It is very difficult to assess what is fiction and what is true biography though I simply didn't worry about it and just enjoyed the novels. They're both excellent books but Summertime is even better and is structured very interestingly.

In this novel, he chooses a different approach in that he tells of dead writer John Coetzee through a journalist's interviews with old friends and acquaintances of Coetzee (mostly women.)

The perspective is interesting and his writing about his dead self from the perspective of others was fascinating. It is set in the 70s when Coetzee lives with his aging father in Cape Town. This is around the time just before he first started to publish novels.

Those that tell the story include his cousin Margot whom he planned on marrying when he was a child,a woman whom he became infatuated with but would have none of him and a former lover.

A consistent theme throughout the book is that Coetzee may have turned out to be a great writer but he certainly didn't strike anyone as a person destined for greatness. Through the eyes of others, Coetzee portrays himself as cold, distant, arrogant and somewhat strange. One of the characters does make a comment that Coetzee may not have appeared that he would be a great writer but he didn't win the Nobel Prize for nothing.

The portrayal of his life in 1970s South Africa is very creative, moves well and gives great insight into JM Coetzee I loved how he wrote about himself but by doing it through the words of others said things that are not quite the same as when one does it directly.

I thoroughly enjoyed it, highly recommend it and wished he had won a third Booker for it

'Summertime' is the brilliant new book by John Coetzee, winner of the Nobel Prize for literature in 2003. This book is part novel, part fictional biography, part memoir, part alternative history, and an obituary for a living writer. Its essence is the imagined life of John Coetzee from 1971 - 1977 as gathered by a biographer who may or may not be Coetzee himself. The basis of the biography consists of interviews with a few people who knew the author, and fragments from the author's journals.

This book is both ambiguous and a page-turner. It is a mystery about the essence of a man or perhaps his imagined self or alter-ego. We see Coetzee through the eyes of female lovers, relatives, colleagues and unrequited loves all interviewed many years after his supposed death. All of these people paint a similar picture of Coetzee as a bland man, socially inept, unassuming, diminished in some emotional capacity, and lacking passion. Is this who Coetzee was or is this a self-deprecatory construct? Is this bland, diminished man the author stripped of his art? Can any artist be viewed separately from his art? Clearly, Coetzee, stripped of his art, is only a cipher. The book weaves interlocking aspects of Coetzee's personality with ever increasing subtlety. Is the fictional Coetzee the 'real' Coetzee's homunculus or is it a shadow of the real self?

Coetzee lives with his father and both are closed men, emotionally guarded, at times antagonistic towards one another. Coetzee's father is a disbarred lawyer who now works as a bookkeeper. Coetzee is said to have gotten into trouble in the United Stated during the Vietnam war and was deported back to South Africa. The two men live simple, apparently boring and vacuous lives together. Both have been displaced and are socially isolated.

Coetzee's first journal entrees speak to his dissatisfaction with living in South Africa. "How to escape the filth: not a new question. An old rat question that will not let go, that leaves its nasty suppurating wound." He writes of the borderlands, murders followed by denials and how he feels soiled by all this. He has conflicted and complex feelings about the corrupt leadership in Africa and the violence correlative with the new apartheid.

The first person interviewed by the biographer is Julia, a therapist with whom Coetzee had a brief and relatively dispassionate affair. Julia describes Coetzee as "scrawny, he had a beard, he wore horn-rimmed glasses and sandals. He looked out of place, like a bird, one of those flightless birds; or like an abstracted scientist who had wandered by mistake out of his laboratory. There was an air of seediness about him, too, an air of failure." It is she who seduces Coetzee and she questions her motivations as "he had no sexual presence whatsoever. It was as if he had been sprayed from head to toe with a neutering spray." Further, he is not a good talker. She perceives John as incapable of love and self-absorbed. "Sex with him lacked all thrill" and had an "autistic quality". At one point, John brought her a copy of his first published book, 'Dusklands'. She was not impressed with it but "simply surprised that this intermittent lover of mine, this amateur handyman and part-time schoolteacher, had it in him to write a book-length book and, what is more, find a publisher."

Julia is very surprised at John's need to write and his belief that books give meaning to life. John wants books to provide him with immortality. Julia is more pragmatic. Rather than continuing to write, she recommends that John find a good wife. She uses her therapeutic background to analyze John's books which she views as having a recurrent theme of the woman not falling for the man. "My guess, my highly informed guess, is that it reflects his life experience. Women didn't fall for him - not women in their right senses. They inspected him, they sniffed him, they even tried him out. Then they moved on." She finds it very odd that a man who is hardly capable of intimacy makes his living writing books about "intimate human experience".

The biographer interviews John's cousin Margot about their annual family get togethers. In his family group, John is like a "lost sheep" and his relatives, except for Margot, view him with disdain and disapproval. His family are Afrikaners but, since John has been schooled outside South Africa, he is no longer accepted as one of their own. He is viewed as odd, bookish and stuck up. Margot is puzzled that John has learned Hottentot, a Khoi language, all of which are considered dead languages. John states that he's "interested in the things we have lost, not the things we have kept." Margot wonders who John can speak to with these languages. He answers, "the dead . . . who otherwise are cast out into everlasting silence."

Like Julia, Margot sees John as without male aura. "She cannot think of him as a man". She considers him a failed man and a failed son, unable to decide what to do with his own life and incapable of caring for his father. "He doesn't have plans. He is a Coetzee. Coetzee's don't have plans, don't have ambitions, they only have idle longings." John longs to be a writer and to set his father up in a home separate from his own. Like Julia, Margot thinks John would be better off having a wife. However, she doesn't think any woman would have him. Julia and Margot both feel a responsibility for John but are weighed down by his inaccessibility and melancholy.

Further interviews ensue. One is with a woman with whom John had an unrequited love and who detests John to the point that she feels stalked by him. The other two interviews are with his colleagues at a Capetown university. One of these colleagues is male and the other is a woman with whom John had an affair. The woman who despises John talks about how unsuited John is for marriage and describes him "like a man who has spent his life in the priesthood and lost his manhood and become incompetent with women". She acknowledges that he might have been a decent writer but he still "was not anybody". At any rate, she did not read his books. With John's male colleague, similar descriptions of his personality come to light. He's described as a mediocre teacher, reserved, a misfit, incapable of intimacy, and socially inept. This colleague makes a striking point - - "It seems strange to be doing a biography of a writer while ignoring his writing."

All of these interviews take place in the background of a changing South Africa and point to Coetzee's conflicted feelings about the struggles that his country is facing. "He accepted that the liberation struggle was just. The struggle was just but the new South Africa toward which it strove was not utopian enough for him." He yearned for a 'coloured' South Africa where everyone was ethnically the same but again he feels outcast with his Afrikaner heritage and history. His female colleague and lover says, "I think he was happiest in the role of outsider. He was not a joiner". She talks about John's Nobel prize and acknowledges that he must have earned it. However, she is not a fan of his writing. "He had no special sensitivity that I could detect, no original insight into the human condition. He was just a man, a man of his time, talented, maybe even gifted, but frankly, not a giant."

Mr. Coetzee has painted a fictional alter-ego, a self-deprecatory memory, or perhaps a fictional being. Regardless of the historical truth, this is a provocative and extraordinarily important book by one of our greatest living writers. It is about the paradox of art and the artist, about the man who creates great art and who, without his art, is of no great importance. Is it about John Coetzee? In some sense it must be, as he is the author. How much of it is fact? We may never know, but that doesn't matter, as the book itself is a work of enduring art.

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 teacher

Clearly, 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.

Coetzee's Scenes from a Provincial Life is turning into one of the weirdest memoir projects ever. Apart from his decision to mix fiction with fact, and the obvious confusion over what is true and what isn't, there is also the public-humiliation aspect of these books. Coetzee really knows how to take himself down a peg: in this latest installment he can't fix a car, can't dance, can't cook, is a poor lover (and, worse, a strange one), has a messy house, a bad haircut, and persists in a teaching career for which he has no special gift. It even rains on his picnic, literally rains on it. All those things that turn you off a person are embodied in John Coetzee. As one woman puts it, he isn't like a real man; he's like one of those priests who seems a perpetual boy, and then one day you find he's suddenly become old. Somehow this wretch managed to pick up a Nobel Prize.

With another writer I might get infuriated with this approach: underneath the masochism, it suggests a control freak who anticipates every criticism--who who wants to tear himself down before anyone else does: "Look, I'll show you how to do it." But I know Coetzee to be a compassionate, empathetic writer; this portrait of a cold fish cannot be the whole truth. So what's going on here?

While many of the elements here are completely made up, a certain residue is left over that, I have no doubt, reflects the reality. This was true of the earlier volumes as well. The shape and taste of the life is there, even if the facts are all wrong. We're left suspecting that the artist, who is heroic, has lived deep inside himself--a sentient iceberg that, all these years later, is still worried over the disappointment and confusion he feels he has caused. Coetzee relieves the memoir of all its boring facts, just as he relieves the novel of all its tiresome artifice, to create the only possible answer for his solitude

Summertime is everything that I have come to expect and enjoy when reading Mr Coetzee's writings. Although noted to be fiction, Coetzee seems to be offering a self-revealing glimpse that readers will come to appreciate not only for its honesty and lack of pretense, but for providing a revelation into what makes a good writer great. All is not what it appears to be from the outside, but rather, we are a compilation of history, of family, and of country. This is captured through a series of interviews (with those had known Mr. Coetzee prior to him becoming renowned) that touch upon each of these factors. As one proceeds through this book you will note that a seemingly non-descript, passionless, lonely, fatalistic man can, through his history, his family, and his country, transform and develop an introspection that rises to levels that we would not expect (nor do those who knew Coetzee personally suspect) and is capable of poignantly delivering this message through his writings, if nothing else. This is what makes J.M. Coetzee great and why Summertime will resonate with its readers as all his books do.

In an exquisitely constructed exposition, J. M. Coetzee writes about himself. The book is much more than a memoir. It is a story, depicted primarily as a journalistic exercise consisting of six (6) interviews with people who were influential in Coetzee's life, five (5) of whom were women. The book covers primarily the years 1971, when Coetzeee returned to South Africa after completing his studies in the United States, through 1977 when he was first formally recognized as an outstanding author of fiction.

In many ways the story is reminiscent stylistically of such authors as Thomas Wolfe in "You Can't Go Home Again" and Henry Miller in his epic trilogy "The Rosy Crucifixion" where the authors talk about their struggle to write. However, uncharacteristically, Coetzee deigns to write this `novel' from the perspective of a posthumous study by a journalist who is researching Coetzee's life for the purpose of writing a biography. As such, the book is highly autobiographical. Yet it would seem that due to Coetzee's personal secretive nature, the incidents and characters are real, but `the names have been changed to protect the innocent.'

The text is truly extraordinary in that because it is written in the words of others, Coetzee tackles his view of how he had been perceived by others rather than how he perceives himself. Thus, it leaves the reader wide latitude to interpret what really was going on in the author's mind during the subject time frame.

To help round out the projected image of himself, a number of what Coetzee calls "Notebook Fragments" are included in an appendix to the book. Again, these fragments are reminiscent of yet another author with whom Coetzee has great familiarity, Franz Kafka. In fact, Coetzee makes great use of a Kafka story, "A Report to an Academy" in one of his previous novels.

It is of tremendous interest to Coetzee devotees, the things that the author reveals about himself, especially since the main body of the text is his impressions of how he believes others perceive him. And it is probably true that as he says of himself through the lips of another, that J. M. Coetzee "... could not dance to save his life." He describes himself as very secretive, stiff, English, unromantic and loner. His text makes a very graphic attempt to explain these perceptions, as well as his "anti-political" personal position. It was during his lifetime that South Africa transferred from a legally sanctioned racist country with apartheid as the way of life; to a democracy. The country was ruled by a wealthy white upperclass minority of outsiders that completely subjugated and in essence enslaved the native "Coloured" majority. This transition was all but earth shattering to the denizens of South Africa. In fact, a large percentage of the white population of South Africa emigrated after the transition to democracy. This faction includes Coetzee himself, who now lives in Australia.

In essence, the book is a truly monumental glimpse into the mind and thoughts of one of today's greatest living authors. All readers of Coetzee's prior work should avail themselves of this opportunity to view the expose of the author's inner insights, feelings and perceptions.

"... but it is true to the spirit." Julia, one of the interviewees, admits to Vincent, the young academic, researching the life of one John Coetzee, deceased. "The story you wanted to hear and the story you are getting will be nothing more than a matter of perspective ..." While John was for Julia just an episode in her life, for Vincent, she continues, " by dint of a quick flip... followed by some clever editing, you can transform it into a story about John and one of the women who passed through his life." Her assessment of the biographer's approach to his subject can be applied just as easily to J.M. Coetzee himself. He creates five scenarios, each engaging in its own way, in which John is supposedly the centre of the story. The author even teases the reader with numerous biographical facts of the real J.M. Coetzee, but is, what we are presented with, anything close to a biography? Adriana, another interviewee asks: "What is this?... What kind of a biography are you writing?" We are constantly encouraged to ask the same question.

SUMMERTIME, anticipated as the continuation to the author's fictionalized autobiographies, or "autofiction", Boyhood: Scenes From Provincial Life and Youth: Scenes from Provincial Life II, may not be even that. Vincent, having studied John's diaries and notebooks, travels the world to fill in some gaps and, hopefully, discover new facets of the man's inner emotional being, especially during that decisive time in his subject's life, the mid nineteen seventies. He interviews five individuals - lovers, real or unreciprocated, a close relative and colleagues - some thirty years after the period of interest to him. It is easy to conclude that his interviewees' memories are less than precise after all that time and that each encounter with a 'witness' will shed only some diffuse light on the person under discussion, and more on the interviewee. John Coetzee's own words are added as the opening and the concluding section. While interesting in a broader sense, will they shed more light on the person? It is up to the reader to decide.

With the five interviews that characterize the structure of his "memoir" J.M. Coetzee plays with more than our curiosity to compare John and J.M's personalities and life experiences. Structurally, he varies between an interview setting where the interviewee takes factual liberties when creatively retelling the story of her time in the vicinity of John (Julia), or one where Vincent, the fictional interviewer, retells a creatively rewritten interview with John's cousin Margot, or a more confrontational setting that Vincent encounters with Adriana, the Brazilian dance teacher. Each of these, and to a lesser degree the last two interviews, shed some light on John's intimate life at the time, yet, they are even more engaging for what they say about the social, political and personal environment of the person interviewed. The depiction of John is not very flattering. For example, Julia thought that "... his mental capacities, and specifically his ideational faculties, were overdeveloped, at the cost of his animal self. " His cousin Margot, on the other hand, felt that John was always struggling against the Coetzee inheritance: he was not a "slapgat" a person lacking backbone, choosing the easiest path through life. Adriana, whose had reasons for her hostility towards John summed him up: "He was not a man of substance. Maybe he could write well, maybe had a certain talent for words, I don't know... to my mind a talent for words is not enough if you want to be a great writer. And he was not a great man. He was a little man, an unimportant little man. " Finally, Vincent, while addressing Sophie, the last of the interviewees, expresses a warning to any gullible reader: " "What Coetzee writes there cannot be trusted, not as a factual record - not because he was a liar but because he was a fictioneer. In his letters he is making up a fiction of himself for his correspondents; in his diaries he is doing much the same for his own eyes, or perhaps for posterity,..."

This is exactly what J.M. Coetzee did - creating a fictioneer's account of somebody who may have traits of himself, or, very likely, not so many - and having great fun with entertaining the reader with the stories. His intimate knowledge of the social and political conditions in South Africa, life in Cape Town as well as the remote region of the Karoo shines through and gives the novel an added depth and a reality check. The interviews are exquisitely crafted and complement the multi-faceted portrait of a fictioneer written by an even greater fictioneer. [Friederike Knabe]

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?

From a literary point of view, Summertime is of the highest quality. The language is one of honesty and depth. It is experimental in its structure and aim. The writer plays with the unknown, namely the view of him after his demise. He is experienced, therefore he is able to play with structure and content. This is not just interesting for the reader, this is a writer's version of top literature.We used to have writers like Coetzee in the United States. What happened, that instead we now have mostly block busters, that are here today, gone next week. I am just grateful that there are still places on our globe that allow a writer to bring forth and publish such excellence. Sonia Meyer

Do you really know who you are? Have you found a self there, somewhere in you? Is that why we read (or write) books - to discover who we are through sympathizing with others? Writing your own biography after you are dead might be a way to learn about who you are. And you might try to interview a few people who knew you. You might discover that they found you disembodied. How is it possible that a Nobel prize winning author was so disembodied? What is disembodied? What did Elizabeth Costello really believe in? What was John Coetzee really like? Does John Coetzee know what he was really like? This is a compelling work because of how, after reading it, you may look for a "self" you assume may be embodied in you.