Summertime: Fiction

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.

This is the most sheerly enjoyable book Coetzee has produced in ages. After the somewhat arid self-referentiality of [[ASIN:B000GUJHB2 SLOW MAN]] and [[ASIN:0143114484 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 [[ASIN:0805090800 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?

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.

I actually read this book twice because I simply didn't want to believe that an award-winning author could create a novel full of such bleakness, however honest. Written in interview form (primarily), several people recount their opinions of Coetzee. Since J.M. Coetzee is writing the book, it could presumably be autobiographical but it is written as fiction so the reader has to guess how accurate it is.

SPOILER ALERT: the ending of this book was the clincher for me. While I may have had doubts about how accurately the interviewees knew Coetzee, the ending is written by "Coetzee" or the fictional Coetzee and involves a decision about whether to care for his father or desert him totally, a recurrent theme in the book.

The J. M. Coetzee in this book is cast as a distant, unkempt, odd person, someone who blunders about when it comes to sex and is a puzzle to most of those who know him. I couldn't wait to get rid of this book, no matter how acclaimed the author. Reading the book twice, checking reviews, researching the author...was enough for me. Somehow I must have missed the point of this one entirely.

"... 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", [[ASIN:014026566X Boyhood: Scenes From Provincial Life]] and [[ASIN:0142002003 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]

The Nobel Prize winning author, J.M. Coetzee is dead. A young English biographer is in the process of writing about him. The biographer had never met the celebrated author. Through fragments of his writings, the biographer has targeted five people who were important in the author's life mainly during the 70s before he began writing seriously. Two are former lovers, one a woman with whom Coetzee was obsessed and who rejected him, also female cousin and another a man who was a colleague in academia. The novel mainly consists of interviews with these five people, several of whom are suprised that they played an important role in the author's psyche. What emerges is a picture of man who is cold and withholding, withdrawn and ill at ease with women; one not fitting in to South African society. Is this a true depiction that Coetzee gives of himself? I don't know. Along the way we are given evocative depictions of the beauty and turmoil of a South Africa in transition; depictions of guilt both political and personal. Coetzee tenderly and brutally honestly writes about his relationship with his aging father and the guilt it engenders in him. And he explores many unanswered questions. Is it possible for a writer who is so personally cold and withdrawn, to be a great writer? Is he a great writer? What is one's responsibility to one's country and one's family? What emerges is a complex picture of a man and a writer, a picture that will keep one pondering well after the novel is over.

There's never a negative review on the cover. Not that this book deserves a negative review, but neither is it mesmerizing. Coetzee has written his own autobiography in the form of a novel. It isn't much about his writing career, which is as far as I know, is what he is noted for.
The writer interviews several people with whom Coetzee had relationships at some time in his life. His relationships, as characterized in the book, are, well, pitiful. Sexually, he's cold as a fish, robotic. A comparison is made to Kafka.
However, it's worth reading, partly because the happenings are engaging. But also, because many people who achieve fame can't avoid flattering themselves that they are better than most of humanity. Coetzee seems to have little ego and no apparent need to make himself look good. This is a kind of honesty that is to be cherished.
So Diogenes, that honest man you were looking for, well is he here, or is Coetzee telling the story so baldly that others will feel compelled to tell of a man who was better than his autobiography said he was. Or is he suggesting, that the great are different and allowed to be so.

[[ASIN:1587219298 Where Lilacs Bloom]] [[ASIN:055713384X RVing Solo Across America . . . without a cat, dog, man, or gun]]

"How can you be a great writer if you are just an ordinary man? Surely you must have a certain flame in you that sets you apart from the people in the street." So muses Adriana, a Brazilian dancer who is one of the individuals being interviewed by a young English biographer who is researching a book about the dead South African writer John Coetzee.

In Summertime -- a book that straddles the fiction and memoir genres -- John Coetzee takes the bold step of imagining himself dead and empowering others to look at his life with an unsparing eye. Mr. Coetzee has, in real life, been viewed as a most reclusive and humorless figure who has shunned the public eye with a vengeance. And through Summertime, Mr. Coetzee reveals that he is well aware of how he is perceived, and in fact, agrees with those perceptions.

Each woman -- Julia, the bored married neighbor, Margot, his Afrikaner cousin and first love, and the fiery Adriana -- concur that John Coetzee is a cold fish, an unlikely person to achieve such success. He is referred to as a socially inept, slight and unattractive, non-sensual, solitary, not made for the company of women. (This despite the fact that in real life, Mr. Coetzee WAS married for several years). He is also described as difficult to love, inappropriately (sometimes laughably) romantic. As Adriana states, "Freedom, sensuality, erotic love - it was all just an idea in his head, not an urge rooted in his body. He had no gift for it."

But that is precisely Mr. Coetzee's point in Summertime: Why SHOULD anyone care about him as a human being? And why should anyone expect more from his work than it offers? When Julia asks, "But why should the people of the future bother to read the books you write if it doesn't speak to them, if it doesn't help them find meaning in their lives?", the eponymous Coetzee character answers, "Perhaps they will still like to read books that are well written." And then Coetzee goes a step further and makes one more point: What if we all continually make up the stories of our lives? Aren't our life-stories ours to construct as we wish, within or even against the constraints imposed by the real world?

The man who has said to have only a dour sense of humor is having some fun here; obviously, not everything that's written is entirely true (after all, Coetzee himself is dead in this book). And there may or may not be real-life counterparts. But in the end, Coetzee implies these are HIS life-stories, just as this is HIS life-work. In this, he is in absolute revolt against his fictional biographer, who states, "A great writer becomes the property of all of us."