Product Description

A title that completes the trilogy of fictionalised memoir begun with 'Boyhood' and 'Youth'.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #40420 in Books
• Published on: 2009-08-13
• Original language: English
• Binding: Hardcover
• 272 pages

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• Mint Condition
• Dispatch same day for order received before 12 noon
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Review
`More tricky autobiographical fiction from the master of the form' --Marie Claire

"The cumulative effect of Coetzee's unblinking honesty and...seriousness, is an understanding of the creation of a great writer" -- Sunday Telegraph Books

`Coetzee, 69, is in a beautifully reflective mood here...Summertime shows...he is an intense outstanding and very enjoyable talent.' -- Scotland on Sunday

`What Summertime offers is a subtle, allusive meditation' -- Financial Times

`Summertime is both an elegant request...and ample evidence, once again, why that request should be honoured'
--The Observer

`A poignant, cubistic portrait...of the artist as outsider.' --TLS

`it represents a way of breaking the genre of the memoir by over- and under-fulfilling its demands at the same time' --New Statesman

`I'm a huge fan and this latest novel has only increased my ardour.' --Radio Times

"Clever, tricky, a redefinition of what fiction is."
--Grazia, Kate Mosse

'his finest work of the past decade' --Times Literary Supplement

`This novel is so compelling I defy anyone not to finish it at a sitting' -- Seven Magazine in Sunday Telegraph

"brilliant... a playful meditation on life, truth and art --Tatler

`has a humour and humanity that should win new fans' --Independent

`Not since Disgrace has he written with such urgency and feeling'
--The New Yorker

From the Inside Flap
A young English biographer is working on a book about the late writer, John Coetzee. He plans to focus on the years from 1972–1977 when Coetzee, in his thirties, is sharing a run-down cottage in the suburbs of Cape Town with his widowed father. This, the biographer senses, is the period when he was 'finding his feet as a writer'. Never having met Coetzee, he embarks on a series of interviews with people who were important to him – a married woman with whom he had an affair, his favourite cousin Margot, a Brazilian dancer whose daughter had English lessons with him, former friends and colleagues. From their testimony emerges a portrait of the young Coetzee as an awkward, bookish individual with little talent for opening himself to others. Within the family he is regarded as an outsider, someone who tried to flee the tribe and has now returned, chastened. His insistence on doing manual work, his long hair and beard, rumours that he writes poetry evoke nothing but suspicion in the South Africa of the time. Sometimes heartbreaking, often very funny, Summertime shows us a great writer as he limbers up for his task. It completes the majestic trilogy of fictionalised memoir begun with Boyhood and Youth.

From the Back Cover
Boyhood 'This life is described with such skill, such exactitude and such relentlessness that I found myself gasping for air... Coetzee has achieved something universal in his work... a fine book, probably the best description of a childhood I have ever read' The Times 'As funny, cruel and terrifying as life itself. It is also intense and elegant, clearly the product of the complex, subtle imagination which shapes Coetzee's outstanding fiction... As austerely beautiful as would be expected of Coetzee the artist... its aloof, edgy grace and seething passion ensure the narrative is both truthful and mysterious' Irish Times Youth 'Only a writer as great as J.M. Coetzee is capable of infusing meditation on the spoilt hope of youth with such clarity, fluency and poise... The quality of the writing and its unflinching truthfulness make it exhilarating' Daily Mail 'A memorable picture of the harshness London can offer to incomers... Youth is a wonderful book: a Bildungsroman, or portrait of the artist as a young man, to rank with any in the canon' Evening Standard

Customer Reviews

A portrait of the artist... as a supporting character
Ostensibly, J.M. Coetzee's Summertime is a third instalment of autobiography, succeeding Boyhood (1998) and Youth (2002) (both of which, incidentally, are excellent). But this description belies the book's true nature in two ways. First, Summertime is so far from being a conventional autobiography it's essentially a work of fiction. Second, it's a terrific book in its own right, and can be enjoyed without any prior knowledge of its forerunners.

The book begins in a style resembling Boyhood and Youth. Brief scenes from the life of Coetzee, now a thirtysomething in 1970s apartheid South Africa, are narrated in crisp third-person prose. Coetzee, we learn, is a down-and-out, unemployed and living with his elderly father, disgusted by apartheid but stuck in a rut of inaction verging on paralysis. But each scene stops abruptly, clearly unfinished, and after 15 pages the narrative stops altogether. What's going on? Here emerges the book's central conceit: Coetzee has died, leaving behind notebooks of assorted scraps. A would-be biographer, seeking to reconstruct "the story" of Coetzee's life, interviews a number of people who knew Coetzee at that time, and transcripts of these (fictional) interviews occupy most of the book's remainder.

The interviewees give us little vignettes in which Coetzee is a ghostly figure, a barely-there anonynimity, content to be manipulated and exploited by stronger characters: a man defined by his fleeting and unsatisfying connections to others. He is a supporting character. "I am perfectly aware it is John you want to hear about, not me," says Julia, Coetzee's one-time lover. "But the only story involving John that I can tell, or the only one I am prepared to tell, is this one, namely the story of my life and his part in it, which is quite different, quite another matter, from the story of his life and my part in it."

What a wonderful antidote to most autobiographies, in which the author is the protagonist in "My Story", steering a course through life like a Greek hero at the helm of a ship. Lives aren't like that. And what a remarkable fictional achievement, since, after all, the "interviews" are pure fiction. Coetzee imagines himself as he must have been viewed by others (scruffy, shy, maladroit, and not a bestselling-author-in-waiting), and does so with great perceptiveness and self-effacement, through a skilfully crafted range of utterly convincing other-voices.

John Berger famously wrote that "never again will a single story be told as though it were the only one". In this rich and intelligent work, Coetzee emphasizes that this goes for life stories too.

Review of Summertime JM Coetzee by Amanda Bennett
Book Review

Summertime by J M Coetzee

Summertime (2009) is the third of South African John Coetzee's fictionalised autobiographies following Boyhood (1997) and youth (2002). The inspired novel centres around a young English biographer who is working on a book about the late writer, John Coetzee, focusing on the years 1972-1977 when Coetzee was in his thirties.
Following the premature end to his six years in America, John returned to South Africa to live in the outskirts of Cape Town with his widowed father. This period is emphasised by the biographer as an era when Coetzee was `finding his feet as a writer'.
Never having met Coetzee, he embarks on an exciting journey of interviewing a number of characters who were physically and emotionally involved with him.

The Coetzee that we are introduced to, through a series of interviews, is lonely and uncomfortable with almost every aspect of his life. Further on in the novel, a more humuorous side is developed as Coetzee becomes sexually involved with a number of female characters. He takes up dancing in attempt to woo a woman, only to make a fool of himself. Coetzee continues to place himself in awkward situations throughout the novel creating an ongoing theme of comedy for the reader to enjoy.

Within the novel, he is regarded with mistrust by his family as he engages in manual labour in penitence for his country's long history of `making other people do our work for us as we sit in the shade and watch'. His love for the Coetzee family estate in the Karoo remains as passionate as ever it was in Boyhood but everywhere else he is lost. South Africa has become a `loud angry place'.

Summertime is a captivating portrait of life, and like most lives it is full of dichotomy and everyday moral struggles. It is biographical in most of its elegant content, yet largely fictional in the manner of its telling. It is meant to be about one man, however it spends most of the time exploring the lives of the characters John was involved with. This unpredictable period of John's life is presented by women who John believed he had a significant relationship with. Unfortunately, it was unrequited love, and from the female side of the story, their relationships held no passion.

Dominating the Man Booker Prize Summertime is said to be his most popular work since Youth was published seven years ago, also another enticing read.
In style and character, one gets the feeling that this portrayal is true to the man Coetzee feels himself to be. It is an exercise in self awareness and honesty which makes his autobiographies such a joy to read, exploring the life of one of our greatest esteemed writers.

By Amanda Bennett

Bournemouth University

Coetzee on Coetzee but lacks objectivity
Coetzee seeks to make his readers uncomfortable, putting one on edge so one is never sure about one's emotional response. The fact that we all respond differently, and any response is fine, simply highlights Coetzee's ability to put us on the spot, making us feel as though we alone are experiencing a totally inappropriate reaction.

That edge is somewhat missing here as Coetzee commutes some of his usual forthright, no-holds-barred style in favour of a little navel gazing and self-certification. He recounts this period in his pseudo-autobiographical series by deploying a fictional writer, a biographer, who interviews a number of people who knew Coetzee, lover, cousin, colleague that sort of thing, in an effort to understand a little of the now deceased "great writer". Coetzee throws in these little judgements just to try and self-effacedly knock them down, metaphorically, but he never quite manages it. I was left with the sense that Coetzee wanted to appear even-handed, his fictional biographer would suggest he was a great writer but then fictional interviewee would say Coetzee would have laughed at the suggestion. Oh no he wouldn't, one comes away with the distinct impression that that's exactly what Coetzee feels, Nobel and double-Booker prize winner.

Meanwhile the interviews themselves are written as if in real time, moments of bracketed [silence] punctuating the transcript, the interviewer occasionally checking the interviewees meaning and whether it is alright to include that particular interlude in the book itself. Except it is a clunky device that doesn't ring true, it does not depict a likely exchange.

The stories the interviewees tell are insightful. His personal circumstances, relationship with his father, views of his own sexuality and social success and the political landscape paint a very definite picture of the man in the 1970s, albeit he is asking questions in retrospect that suggest he believes he does not really know himself after all. And that is the essence of this volume, it is Coetzee exploring just what he believes himself to be and coming up short of an answer.

It's not Booker material and some way from high standard.