Summertime

Sep 26, 2009 brian rated it 3 of 5 stars

late at night, absent people or drink, when it rages out in furnace fear, i think of you and whether it be simply that 1. misery loves company or 2. even though we do, indeed, die alone you remind me that we all do it so at least we're all connected in our aloneness -- your life and your words in some tiny tiny tiny way lessen the burden of existence. as with my dog, i know that you will most likely die long before i do and it kind of makes me want to eat the shotgun knowing i'll be living in a...more

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Oct 06, 2012 Kristen rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: fiction

Mr. Coetzee, how many more books will it take to forgive yourself the original sin of your birth?

(Man, do I love short books, I'm incredibly fucking lazy, just spit it out already. Coetzee understands that!)

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Jun 14, 2011 Vestal McIntyre added it

After Boyhood and Youth, I expected another searing self-portrait told in calm and beautifully measured third-person. What I got is autobiography in quite a revolutionary form: the women who knew Coetzee in his early thirties are interviewed about the now-dead author. Utterly engaging, filled with awkward intimacy and painful slip-ups, Summertime is the best book in the trilogy, the best book I've read in a year.

Another interesting aspect of the book: so many "greats" have written their portrait...more

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Mar 19, 2013 Bettie marked it as to-read · review of another edition

Shelves: published-2009, booker-longlist, african-continent, afr-s-africa, afr-botswana, nobel-laureate, one-penny-wonder, paper-read

St Peter's and St Paul's Parish Church, Lavenham, book sale

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Mar 04, 2010 Isabelle rated it 5 of 5 stars

It has been a very long time since I read something that original... The premise of the book is so unusually incisive, so creative in itself... Coetzee writes his own biography, post his fictive death, as strung together through his notebooks and the interviews of some of his contemporaries.
Behind the dry humor and subtle self-deprecation, there are some very serious underlying themes, mostly pertaining to life in South Africa in the 70's, Afrikaners, natives, Apartheid etc... but also dealing w...more

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Dec 31, 2009 Tony rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: fiction-mainstream

Coetzee, J. M. SUMMERTIME. (2009). ****. I have been in a room where different writers were discussing the relative merits of writing in the first person or in the third person. Mr. Coetzee goes them one better. In this fictionalized autobiography, he uses both voices once removed. A young English writer is doing research for a limited biography of Coetzee for the period 1971-1979. In his research he interviews several people who were involved, in one way or another, with the author during this...more Coetzee, J. M. SUMMERTIME. (2009). ****. I have been in a room where different writers were discussing the relative merits of writing in the first person or in the third person. Mr. Coetzee goes them one better. In this fictionalized autobiography, he uses both voices once removed. A young English writer is doing research for a limited biography of Coetzee for the period 1971-1979. In his research he interviews several people who were involved, in one way or another, with the author during this period. He is not able to interview the author directly since he is already dead. During the period under study, Coetzee was living in Capetown and was doing a variety of jobs while writing poetry. He was also looking after his father who was reaching a stage of senility that required outside assistance. Through the biographer to be (Mr. Vincent), we meet five people who are willing to share their stories and experiences with Coetzee in response to the questions asked. The interviews were rather free-wheeling, but attempted to get at the basic Coetzee ethic. Four of these interviewees were women; one a man. The first was Julia, a married woman – at the time – who had an affair with the author. The affair was rather casual and was the result of boredom on Julia’s part since her husband was away from home frequently – and was also up to extramarital activities. She describes John as mostly not being there, emotionally and sexually. It was as if he was too far removed from the mundane activities of normal people to participate in their activities. She had read one of his books since then, but didn’t follow up with any of the others. Margot, John’s cousin, was close to John when they were children, but had been separated for a long time by their individual lives. When they meet again – at the time – John is in the midst of caring for his father and also considering moving out of Capetown into a shack in the country. It would be cheaper to live there and his father, he said, would be more comfortable. Margot tried to point out the fallacy in John’s thinking, and in the process learned the probable real reason for his intended move. He wanted to be alone in order to think better. Living with his father was invading his privacy to the point that he could no longer organize his thoughts. He also tried to explain to Margot the differences between the country and the city vis-a-vis race relations and the dignity of man. Adriana was a fiesty Brazilian woman who had lived in Capetown for a while, along with her two daughters. Her encounter with John was as the English tutor for her daughters. Although not strictly a teacher, Coetzee would spend time – on an hourly basis – with students who wanted to improve their English. The relationship between John and Adriana was firely confrontational. She felt that he had designs on his daughters and did all in her power to get him out of their lives. It gives us a chance, however, to get an idea of Coetzee’ philosophy of teaching – different from the ones in play at the time. Two other past acquaintences, Martin, a teacher at the University who got his position in preference to John, and Sophie, a French instructor at the school who taught a course in tandem with John – and had a sexual liaison with him. Both of these former friends portrayed John as a good man and a good – though perhaps not great – writer. Through all of these interviews, Coetzee manages to provide a picture of his fictionalized self – as he would like us to see him – in a unique way, and moves this autobiography forward in time from his previous works. Recommended.(less)

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May 05, 2013 Diane rated it 3 of 5 stars

Coetzee blew me away with the master craftsmanship of section, "Julia," but I read too much in successive sections and to narcissistic, sloppy effect, of Coetzee writing as a person speaking about Coetzee, pretending not to know how Coetzee himself would respond and only what he/she thinks Coetzee would respond with. I had the distinct impression as a reader that I was being gamed. I enjoyed Margot too, but the others to my chagrin were too much paper doll and not enough flesh. Too much of the s...more

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Mar 16, 2013 Robert rated it 2 of 5 stars

Summertime by J.M. Coetzee is labeled "fiction," not "a novel," or "a collection of autobiographical investigations disguised as a story cycle," or some other generic propositon. Just "fiction."

Ok, it goes this way: there is a biographer, an academic, who goes through the deceased John Coetzee's notebooks and focuses a lot of effort on five extended interviews with four women and one man who were important in Coetzee's life. Two of the women were sexually involved with him; one was a cousin; on...more

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Oct 03, 2012 Geoffrey Fox rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

In this his third fictional autobiography, Coetzee portrays the early adulthood of a man very much like himself — with even the same name, "John Coetzee" — with similar origins and history (born into an English-speaking Afrikaner family near Capetown, returned to South Africa after some years abroad including the US, later to become a well-known writer). However this fictional John Coetzee is now dead, and what we learn about this period of his life, in his 30s and before he achieved fame as a w...more In this his third fictional autobiography, Coetzee portrays the early adulthood of a man very much like himself — with even the same name, "John Coetzee" — with similar origins and history (born into an English-speaking Afrikaner family near Capetown, returned to South Africa after some years abroad including the US, later to become a well-known writer). However this fictional John Coetzee is now dead, and what we learn about this period of his life, in his 30s and before he achieved fame as a writer, comes from journal notes and interviews by an English academic of people who were somehow involved with him then: a suburban housewife in an adulterous affair, an Afrikaans-speaking cousin with whom he had as a child fantasized marriage, a younger French woman and college-teaching colleague who saw her affair with him as a way to overcome a bad marriage, a Brazilian woman he ineffectually pursued, and a male teaching colleague with whom he had a cordial but rather distant friendship. The Coetzee portrayed here is a man very sensitive to injustice, hopelessly incompetent socially, who has left his acquaintances somewhat puzzled that he ever amounted to anything. Certainly, to some extent this is an effort by the author to see himself as others see him (as the Burns poem has it), but the novel is not so much about a real John Coetzee as about South Africa in the 1970s, the limitations and hypocrisies in Afrikaner culture, the indifference of most of the world (at least in that setting) to the literature that so much matters to the fictional and to the real John Coetzee. Besides the self-deprecating and often very amusing tone of the central protrait, the book offers clear-eyed, unsentimental perceptions of Afrikaner self-isolation (with a language spoken nowhere else in the world, as the fictitious Coetzee has jotted in his journal), the mind-dulling routines of college ritual, and the sharply contrasting concepts of manliness as between the protagonist himself and, most sharply, the Brazilian widow who remembers her big, bold husband.(less)

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Sep 05, 2012 Scott rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Sitting on the porch of the Bogan Lane Inn on Mackinac Island one morning, drinking my coffee and enjoying the cool morning air, I was nearing completion of this novel when one of the other residents of the B&B bicycled up. "You're reading Coetzee." "Yes." "Which one?" "Summertime." "You've read Disgrace of course." "No, this is my first Coetzee." "That book is good, but Disgrace is his book."

Ah, the joys of travel.

Summertime is an autobiographical novel. It imagines that John Coetzee is dea...more Sitting on the porch of the Bogan Lane Inn on Mackinac Island one morning, drinking my coffee and enjoying the cool morning air, I was nearing completion of this novel when one of the other residents of the B&B bicycled up. "You're reading Coetzee." "Yes." "Which one?" "Summertime." "You've read Disgrace of course." "No, this is my first Coetzee." "That book is good, but Disgrace is his book."

Ah, the joys of travel.

Summertime is an autobiographical novel. It imagines that John Coetzee is dead and that his son is interviewing key figures from his father's life in Cape Town in the mid 1970's, a period formative in his writing and before he became a well-known, award-winning novelist. It is an interesting structure, telling the story through imagined interviews, each one a little different. The personalities of each of the characters emerges in the way they tell the story. What you learn of John Coetzee is that he is, at least in this period, a relatively impotent, pathetic person. But your interest is captivated by each of the interviewees and what you learn of them.

And the condition of South Africa at the time. This is the story of an Afrikaner troubled by the current political situation, but not doing much about it. Though he is doing his little bit.

He's also caring for an aging father. "Caring for" is probably too generous of a term. There are squabbles with an extended family, which put a mirror to some of my personal situations. I was moved at one point; I seemed to be encountering some of my own sins.

One of the main themes is his love life and his inability to engage in a healthy, productive relationship. Primarily, he falls for women who aren't interested in him. He seems to have some romantic conceptions of love, which don't bear fruit in reality. But he is an attentive person. There are some revealing insights on desire and sex, particularly as some of the women don't find in him what they want.

Read it for these reflections on Afrikaner culture and for these little insights into human nature and relationships.(less)

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Aug 11, 2012 Carl Rollyson rated it 5 of 5 stars

Novelists enjoy taking revenge on biographers. A typical example of this phenomenon is William Golding’s The Paper Men (1984), in which a biographer is featured as a snoop digging through his subject’s kitchen pail. Only in rare instances do biographers not come off as second-raters and sensationalists, as in Bernard Malamud’s Dubin’s Lives (1979). But no writer of distinction has definitively challenged the line Henry James laid down in The Aspern Papers (1888), where the biographer is dismisse...more Novelists enjoy taking revenge on biographers. A typical example of this phenomenon is William Golding’s The Paper Men (1984), in which a biographer is featured as a snoop digging through his subject’s kitchen pail. Only in rare instances do biographers not come off as second-raters and sensationalists, as in Bernard Malamud’s Dubin’s Lives (1979). But no writer of distinction has definitively challenged the line Henry James laid down in The Aspern Papers (1888), where the biographer is dismissed as a “publishing scoundrel.” Thus J. M. Coetzee’s Summertime is quite a surprise.

Rather than focusing on the unseemly prying biographer—a young Englishman named only as Vincent, about whom we learn very little—the subject, Coetzee himself (or rather his fictional persona, since the Coetzee of the novel is deceased) draws most of the fire. The biographer’s interviewees, who represent quite a range of ages, nationalities, genders, and occupations, come to remarkably similar conclusions about Coetzee: He was not much of a lover and did not demonstrate the genius that would be expected of a Nobel Prize winner. “Women didn’t fall for him,” reports Dr. Julia Frankl, who had an affair with the writer. His cousin Margot Jonker wonders what happened to the brilliant boy she once loved and why he has become a drifter living with his father. To Adrianna Nascimento, a Brazilian woman who spurned Coetzee’s advances, he is a fool and hardly a man at all. But wait! It gets worse: Sophie Denoël, one of Coetzee’s colleagues who taught a course with him, concludes he is an overrated writer devoid of originality.

The interviews make powerful, compelling reading because the voices are so distinctive. The biographer rarely interjects himself. He asks questions and occasionally responds to his interviewee’s queries, fending off their hostile comments about biographers as gossip-mongers by blandly announcing that they can excise whatever they deem inappropriate from his narrative. The only male interviewee, Martin, is concerned that Vincent’s interest in Coetzee’s personal life will come “at the expense of the man’s actual achievement as a writer.” But this objection is raised perfunctorily and does not merit the attention some reviewers give it as an example of the novel’s supposedly anti-biographical theme.

Quite often the biographer maintains silence in the face of provocative comments calling his integrity into question. He is there to get the story and remains thoroughly professional. As a result, so much of the palaver about the indiscretions of biographers seems petty—especially compared to this engrossing investigation of how friends, family, and lovers assess the man they knew. They are far harder on him than any biographer could possibly be.

Coetzee has used himself—or should we say a simulacrum of himself—to show that biography has a powerful a story to tell, regardless of who is hurt and whose privacy is violated. Coetzee seems an anomaly among modern authors, many of whom put their energies into thwarting biographers and trashing the genre. In contrast, Coetzee addresses the profound human need biography satisfies. It is as if he said to himself, “I cannot control what others have thought of me. In fact, there is a pattern of such reactions that some biographer is bound to shape into a narrative. So why not take a whack at it myself?”

For Coetzee, the biographer is not the issue. In Summertime, we do not even learn Vincent’s full name, let alone the experiences that led him to pick his subject— his motivations are not the point. On the contrary, Coetzee seems to realize that he has drawn the world to himself, and the world will find him out. A biography is not something he owes the public; it is just inevitable, no matter what he does and no matter what kind of life he has fashioned.

In so far as the biographer does present a brief for his work, it is mainly this idea that Coetzee belongs to the world and no permission or authorization is required to write Coetzee’s life. The biographer tells this to one of his wary informants, but at the same time he acknowledges that each of his interviewees knew Coetzee in a particular way and that he wants to preserve their memories. At first, it may seem that Vincent is ceding too much when he agrees to omit certain stories, but the overall pattern of the testimony is so persuasive that eliminating this or that iteration of it hardly matters.

Is this novel a disguised autobiography? The question seems to be dismissed in Summertime when Vincent remarks that Coetzee 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.” Such comments level the playing field on which biography and autobiography are the contestants. In effect, there is no unimpeachable standard of truth by which a biography can be found wanting. Thus the extracts from the fictive Coetzee’s notebooks do nothing to undermine the biographer’s work.

Summertime is that rare novel that grants biography its autonomy and treats the biographer as an independent agent, not a parasite or a hanger-on to someone else’s life. It is also a work of fiction that perhaps will break the mold Henry James cast for biography, one that has bedeviled its practitioners for more than a century.(less)

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Jul 26, 2012 Amy Shields rated it 4 of 5 stars

This was an odd, unusual book. One comes away with sympathy for this lonely, awkward, quiet, somewhat cold, somewhat down-hearted man. He's prickly, not entirely sympathetic. This is a memorable quote from the near the end of the book. From when Coetze, as a middle aged Coetze, is talking about his regret over ruining his father's beloved opera record as teenager.

"He wanted his father's breast to swell with that old joy; if only for an hour, he wanted him to relive that lost youth, forget his p...more

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May 27, 2012 John rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

This is the best of the three volumes in Coetzee's fictionalized autobiography. It is told from the point of view of five witnesses who are interviewed by a fictional biographer some time after Coetzee's fictional death.

Four of these witnesses are women Coetzee loved, and their depictions of him are mercilessly corrosive: The thirty-something Coetzee is inept as a manual laborer, a son, and a lover; emotionally inscrutable; and ridiculous in his romantic conceits that are combined with the stan...more

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Apr 22, 2012 Pamela rated it 4 of 5 stars

I always find myself completely absorbed by books by Coetzee. The precision of the language and the rather chilling spareness appeal to me. I was very taken with the first two of his autobiographical volumes, Boyhood and Youth, in which he referred to himself in the novelistic third person. In Summertime, which seems meant to take up where Youth left off, Coetzee maintains the third person, but now we really are dealing with a novel. Several elements do not match up with what is known of Coetzee...more

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Feb 29, 2012 Bonnie Brody rated it 5 of 5 stars

'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...more '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.
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Dec 23, 2011 Sarah Shortall rated it 2 of 5 stars

This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here. The book I read, “Summertime”, by J.M. Coetzee, was a book I found to be interesting with unique twists and turns in a South Africa that no one seems to be able to call home. This book was about the famous Afrikaans writer, John Coetzee, who passed away in “recent years”. A young biographer takes it upon himself to write about Coetzee’s life, something he intends to achieve by speaking to those of importance in Coetzee’s life.
The biographer initially chooses to interview Julia, a married woman...more The book I read, “Summertime”, by J.M. Coetzee, was a book I found to be interesting with unique twists and turns in a South Africa that no one seems to be able to call home. This book was about the famous Afrikaans writer, John Coetzee, who passed away in “recent years”. A young biographer takes it upon himself to write about Coetzee’s life, something he intends to achieve by speaking to those of importance in Coetzee’s life.
The biographer initially chooses to interview Julia, a married woman with whom Coetzee had an affair. The woman goes on to explain her relationship with Coetzee and how she found him awkward and unable to open up to people. Coetzee, she found, was not of marriage material because he was somewhat selfish, and unexplainably different. Next, the biographer interviews Margot, cousin of Coetzee’s and also close childhood friend. As a child, Margot idolized her cousin and explained that they were “in love with each other”. Years later, the cousins reunited, but Margot explained how she and Coetzee had grown to be very different; Margot was happily married whilst Coetzee was single, living alone with his father with whom he had a strained relationship. At one point, Coetzee began speaking in languages that had died out all over the world, so he could “speak to the dead” who wouldn’t understand English or Afrikaans when they had never learned it. Adriana was a woman with whom Coetzee was in love. She found Coetzee annoying and unrealistic—he wrote her poems about love which she found were more his idea of it, he was in love with the idea of love; in love with romance. He wrote her poems about sunsets and other things she found to be complete nonsense. Apart from these interviews, there are small interviews in the book with friends and colleagues of Coetzee, though they are certainly shorter in length. Ultimately, the picture painted of Coetzee for the biographer is not one he expected.
This book is set in South Africa. Though it is an “interview” of sorts, it isn’t a simple question-answer format, more a story told from each separate characters perspective with small input from the biographer and the interviewed. The biographer seems to actually be proof reading his work to each separate person, seeking their opinion. There is small conversation between the two at some points, always highlighted in italic and given its own space. One of the strongest messages in the book seems to be how Coetzee felt he didn’t belong anywhere, not in the country he lived, as he had “stolen” it centuries ago from its owners, the true African people. Yet, the true African people too, feel out of place, feeling the white people are superior to them. The writing is mainly in the past tense, as each character tells their own story, yet conversations and opinions are present tense.
This book is probably more suited to older readers. The constant changing of tenses, view points and conversation thrown in would probably be confusing for younger readers; I found it slightly off-putting myself! Though this book won awards, I found it dragged on a bit too much, and the sudden changes in perspective made it difficult to get into. I definitely wouldn’t recommend it to younger readers or those who don’t like books that are too “heavy” as it certainly had that impact on me. Overall, I found the book interesting, the layout in particular, however I also found several pieces extremely dull and tiring to read.
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Nov 23, 2011 Matthew rated it 4 of 5 stars

I'll be honest: I haven't cared much for Coetzee's work in the last ten years or so. I've been of the opinion that he peaked with Disgrace; his recent novels have been filled with intrusive and barely-veiled author surrogates (especially Elizabeth Costello) who tend to derail an otherwise engrossing narrative.

It was a pleasure, then, to discover that Coetzee has taken that conceit and turned it on it's head here. By writing about his life as being examined by a hagiographic biographer, Coetzee...more

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Jul 28, 2011 Derek Baldwin rated it 5 of 5 stars

According to the booksleeve this is a fictionalised memoir and furthermore the third in a series of similar books by J M Coetzee - none of which I knew when I spotted this one in the library. "Oh look, a Coetzee I haven't read before..." - did not bother to look at the blurb because as far as I am concerned Coetzee is always worth reading. The text is made up of several interview transcripts made by a biographer of "John Coetzee", with a few extracts from Coetzee's notebooks, mainly of a politic...more

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May 20, 2011 Jin rated it 3 of 5 stars

Leslie read this book and had the odd and unsettling experience of finding that she was one of those women characters. I had the less bizarre but still bizarre experience of finding that I have dated Coetzee. (Note to self: make sure these reviews are private asap.) Even the premise of this book reminds me of the ex in question -- the constant contrast between the megalomania inherent in the project and the self-deprecating depiction of himself as an incomplete man and also the playful, game-lik...more

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Apr 15, 2011 Sean de la Rosa rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

This third and final instalment of Coetzees autobiography is written from the perspective of 5 people who most profoundly impacted his life. Some of interactions are intimate, others hostile. Through the 5 interviews, Coetzee shares some deep experiences and beliefs that must have been difficult to put to paper. Here are few lines from the book I really enjoyed:
- I saw her lips move soundlessly, as though there were no words bitter enough for what was in her heart.
- Our presence in South Africa...more

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Apr 13, 2011 David Williams rated it 3 of 5 stars

A quirky and interesting conceit: Coetzee imagines himself as dead, with a researcher interviewing associates from a specific period of his life (1972-1975) for a biography of the writer. The book (not so much novel as third person auto-fiction) is structured mainly around these 'interviews' and supposed snippets from Coetzee's own notebooks of the period. It sounds very clumsy as a structure, doesn't it, yet it works surprisingly well, and there is a real zing in some of the interviews, especia...more

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Jan 04, 2011 Chad Walker rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: new-century, memoirs, 2nd-life, african

This thing is clever. Very sly. In fact, it seems to me anyone writing with this much irony, self-deprecation and self aware humor must be a much more engaging individual than the "John Coetzee" explored within this book's pages. Our subject is examined through the lens of a biographer doing research on said author, narrated through several interviews with people once close to him. Well, not really close - because, as we find out, Coetzee is essentially disembodied, a nervous cloud of dis-ease,...more

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Sep 02, 2010 John rated it 4 of 5 stars

What a clever premise. Mixture of memoir and fiction, Coetzee is dead in the universe of "Summertime." The book follows a fictional biographer of Coetzee's who interviews women Coetzee knew (and in nearly every case, loved) as a young man. The biographer asks the women about their relationships with Coetzee, and what they thought of him. The whole point, I think, is to pursue the question: What makes an author great? Clearly, Coetzee was an ordinary, insecure, and confused young man. How could s...more

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Aug 22, 2010 Fredsky rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Nobel Laureate fictioneer J. M. Coetzee is dead and a scholar is writing his biography. This scholar, Mr. Vincent, never met Coetzee himself and is interviewing five people who knew him and had some actual connection to him. Vincent identified these people from the notebooks that Coetzee had used throughout his life. There are some quotes directly from these notebooks before the transcriptions of the interviews and a few pages directly afterwards that finish the novel.
Coetzee turns out to be v...more Nobel Laureate fictioneer J. M. Coetzee is dead and a scholar is writing his biography. This scholar, Mr. Vincent, never met Coetzee himself and is interviewing five people who knew him and had some actual connection to him. Vincent identified these people from the notebooks that Coetzee had used throughout his life. There are some quotes directly from these notebooks before the transcriptions of the interviews and a few pages directly afterwards that finish the novel.
Coetzee turns out to be very sly. The interviewees share some strong opinions of the dead writer. He was cold, he could appear supercilious, he was disembodied and awkward, socially inept, not only uneasy with but also disconnected from other people and what is considered 'real life'. He makes his living teaching, a job for which he has little talent. He seems to be not a great man. In fact, many consider him to be not a real man at all. He can't fix a car. He is no good in bed. He can't dance!
I wondered what he would say about himself next. Nothing good, or at least nothing complimentary. At some point I wondered why this Mr. Vincent was bothering with such a nonentity. But OK, yes, he did write a novel that won the Nobel Prize. Throughout the investigative process, the five interviewees do their jobs quite well. Their own lives are revealed as they describe Coetzee. There is some nice dialogue between Vincent and his interviewees concerning whether or not he embellished their words. (Mostly he had.)Then of course there are the women, and whether or not they are even telling the truth. Vincent does a great job on the women. It could be that he also does a great job on the men, but, not being a man, I can't quite tell.

In any case, this book is wonderful to read. It's always interesting both personally and politically, and it's always fun to see how Coetzee handles these posthumous interviews. How do we know if any of this is even a little bit true, and how much does that matter anyhow? As to the end notes from Coetzee's notebooks, don't skip ahead.(less)

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Jul 16, 2010 Michael rated it 5 of 5 stars

this book is coetzee's most recent and final of his 'autobiographies', but it is not really autobiography in the usual sense. it is written from the perspective of someone writing a biography of coetzee after coetzee's dead who decides to interview 5 individuals who supposedly had a big impact on coetzee's life. it is very strange to know you are reading coetzee making up what these 5 individuals say about him, bluntly and honestly. most of the stories do not put coetzee in a very nice light, an...more

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Feb 26, 2010 Jason Coleman rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: greatest-hits

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 c...more

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Feb 10, 2010 Stephen rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

The noted novelist and Nobel Prize winner John Coetzee is dead. An unnamed scholar is producing a biography of the great writer and here interviews several people who knew Coetzee in the 1970's, two of them former lovers, a woman on whom he had an unfulfilled crush, and a male friend. All agree that Coetzee was a cold fish and that he hardly had the human sensitivity to be a great writer . . . certainly he was not a great man. "All the time I was with him," says one former lover, "I never had th...more

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Jan 31, 2010 christa rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

The character John Coetzee, as written about in a fictionish like sorta memoir, is socially awkward, not a real man, does not emit any sort of sexual vibe, and was never a great writer embraced by the collective.

"Summertime," by JM Coetzee is delivered as a novel with an alternative story form. Vincent, an English biographer, is conducting interviews with people who knew Coetzee in the early 1970s when he was living in a ramshackle place with his father in South Africa and teaching English. Vin...more The character John Coetzee, as written about in a fictionish like sorta memoir, is socially awkward, not a real man, does not emit any sort of sexual vibe, and was never a great writer embraced by the collective.

"Summertime," by JM Coetzee is delivered as a novel with an alternative story form. Vincent, an English biographer, is conducting interviews with people who knew Coetzee in the early 1970s when he was living in a ramshackle place with his father in South Africa and teaching English. Vincent is trying to eke out anecdotes from the subjects that get to the root of Coetzee as a person for a biography that he concedes that few will read. By this time, the fictional John has died in Australia. Instead Vincent gets a handful of reluctant interviewees who confess that they barely knew the man and didn't necessarily like him.

It starts with Julia, a former neighbor who was introduced to Coetzee when he delivered a bad touch at the grocery store. Julia is married to an absentee husband known for his extracurricular romances, and as a response absorbs Coetzee into her life. They bumble and fumble in the bedroom, just once actually syncing up sexually, and then dissolve from each other's lives. Julia moves to Canada and barely gives John another thought. Meanwhile, she may have appeared in character-form in at least one of his novels.

Margot is a cousin who was once very close to young John, but time has accentuated their differences. She tells Vincent about a family reunion that Coetzee attended, weirding out his relatives. Margot stays in touch briefly afterward, sending John letters filled with advice on how to get normal. Adriana is a fiery Brazilian dancer whose daughter is studying English with John. She invites him over for dinner and immediately questions his credentials and his manhood. Meanwhile, John falls nutso futso for her, sends her countless love letters and shows up in her dance class. Martin met John when they interviewed for the same job, and the two maintained a friendship. He talks about John as a writer. Sophie was a former colleague who eventually fell into bed with the writer.

"As to what imprint I may have left on him, that I'm not in the position to judge," Sophie says. "But in general, I would say that unless you have a strong presence you do not leave a deep imprint; and John does not have a strong presence. I do not mean to sound flippant. I know he had many admirers; he was not awarded the Nobel Prize for nothing; and of course you would not be here today, doin gthese researches, if you did not think he was important as a writer But -- to be serious for a moment -- in all the time I was with him I never had the feeling I was with an exceptional person, a truly exceptional human being."

Ouch.

This worked better for me when I was in the mindset that I was reading something pretty damn close to the truth than read as pure fiction. Imagine being involved with a room full of people gossiping about you, but you are the puppetmaster of the conversation and through yourself, you are described as an asexual loony bird with a undefinable relationship with your father. It is navel-gazing at its finest and most self deprecating. As straight-up fiction, parts run cold. Dispatches from John's cousin bored me so much I almost jumped ship, until I reminded myself what the writer was doing. (less)

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Jan 21, 2010 Erik Simon rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

For the short take, this was a terrific read. If you want the longer take, meet me at the next paragraph.

I hate memoirs, or at least, I hate what they've become: tomes of self-pity focussed either on a terrible childhood or a life of self-destruction. Yawn. The best of memoirs are those that focus on a specific time or place in which the author happened to live. This memoir, the third in a trilogy of memoirs, offers me a vivid slice of life in South Africa in the seventies. But that's only part...more

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Jan 19, 2010 Eric rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Brilliant. Another mindbender from JMC. In 266 pages he has foiled his inevitable biographers, had some fun and made many salient points about many things including writing, politcs and the human condition.

Who else would have himself described as not homosexual, but still "soft," "not a man," "tepid" and "not made for the company of women?" Not to mention "autistic" in bed. Another interesting description of the early writer: "Without being a Dionysian himself, he approved in principle of Diony...more

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title link	preview: Summertime
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BBCode	[url=http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6337163-summertime?utm_medium=api&utm_source=blog_book][img]http://d.gr-assets.com/books/1320563255l/6337163.jpg[/img][/url] [url=http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6337163-summertime?utm_medium=api&utm_source=blog_book]Summertime by J.M. Coetzee[/url]

Summertime (Scenes from Provincial Life #3)

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