I am treating it as a novel, but for the ease of both reviewer and reader here is a naming convention.

It is, more than anything else, a fictionalized autobiography posing as a novel. Summertime is a novel that can be read from many perspectives and on many levels. Even the dreadful Not Untrue and Not Unkind tries to - this book shows how bad O’Loughlin’s attempt is.) Good authors like Coetzee acknowledge the price they have extracted from those whom they observed. (Another Booker longlist title - How to Paint a Dead Man - explores this theme as well. Writers in particular are conscious of what that means. In order to be a successful artist, whatever the genre, there needs to be a certain distance - that “membrane” described in the opening quote to this review - created between living in the world and compiling observations of that world. Their art grows from that observing, their life and survival from taking part. In another - and that is the one that this review will focus on - it is an examination of the cost that other people close to him paid for his chance to do that.Īll creative people - writers, artists, composers - not only take part in the world, they observe it. In one sense, it is a study of the environment and experiences which caused him to write what he did. It focuses on his life in the early 1970s, shortly before his first novel - Dusklands - appeared. Whatever else this book may be (and it is a lot, as you will discover) it is not an exploration of the works of Nobel Prize winning author J. In fact, Coetzee’s only crime against his father was to have scratched one of his favourite long-playing records.Purchased from the Book Depository (click on cover for more info) As I read this extraordinary book I thought more and more of Kafka – in particular his hostile and guilt-ridden letter to his father. It is also true that Coetzee has little talent for reproducing the texture of place and people: his realm is principally within the consciousness. It takes a remarkable kind of adamantine truthfulness to say this of your own work. These recollections are unsparing in their depiction of Coetzee’s shortcomings as a human being: he understands that ''he is trapped in his own personality, so that he is incapable of writing warm, human novels’’.

This time, Coetzee is seen through the eyes of his Afrikaner cousin, and first love. There are also some remarkable scenes of the father and son relationship throughout this book and some equally wonderful scenes which look back to his relationship with his Afrikaner family in the Karoo. There are some telling remarks that demonstrate Coetzee was always following events closely, for all his passivity. It was a time of high tensions in the Nationalist Government as it faced both internal opposition and extreme pressure from abroad.

Summertime by jm coetzee