β Scribed by Coetzee, J. M.
No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
Shortlisted for the 2009 Man Booker Prize
A brilliant new work of fiction from the Nobel Prize-winning author of Disgrace and Diary of a Bad Year
A young English biographer is researching a book about the late South African writer John Coetzee, focusing on Coetzee in his thirties, at a time when he was living in a rundown cottage in the Cape Town suburbs with his widowed father-a time, the biographer is convinced, when Coetzee was finding himself as a writer. Never having met the man himself, the biographer interviews five people who knew Coetzee well, including a married woman with whom he had an affair, his cousin Margot, and a Brazilian dancer whose daughter took English lessons with him. These accounts add up to an image of an awkward, reserved, and bookish young man who finds it hard to make meaningful connections with the people around him.
Summertime is an inventive and inspired work of fiction that allows J.M. Coetzee to imagine his own life with a critical and unsparing eye, revealing painful moral struggles and attempts to come to grips with what it means to care for another human being. Incisive, elegant, and often surprisingly funny, Summertime is a compelling work by one of today's most esteemed writers.
Starred Review. Nobel laureate and two-time Booker-winner Coetzee has been shortlisted for the third time for this powerful novel, a semisequel to the fictionalized memoirs Boyhood and Youth that takes the form of a young biographer's interviews with colleagues of the late author John Coetzee. To Dr. Julia Frankl, who briefly sought in Coetzee deliverance from her husband, he was not fully human; to his cousin, Margot Jonker, he is boring, ridiculous and misguided; and to Sophie DenoΓ«l, an expert in African literature, Coetzee is an underwhelming writer with no original insight into the human condition. The harshest characterizationβand also the best of the interviewsβcomes from Adriana Nascimento, a Brazilian emigrant who met Coetzee when both were teachers in Cape Town; she was repulsed by the intellectual's attempts at courtship. He is nothing, she says, was nothing... an embarrassment. The biographer's efforts to describe his subject ultimately result in an examination that reaches through fiction and memoir to grasp what the traditional record leaves out. (Jan.)
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"This is the third instalment of a life so reserved, so repressed, so seething with polite rage and restrained despair that it could only be approached through a third-person voice... it is wonderful stuff. But then, Coetzee is wonderful: edgy, black, remorselessly human, witty, and often outright funny... Summertime is offbeat and deliberate, elusive and truthful."
--Irish Times
"The cumulative effect of Coetzee's unblinking honesty and his never-wavering seriousness, is an understanding of the creation of a great writer."
--Sunday Telegraph
"Beautifully reflective... reveal a strangely sincere, self-critical and romantic man... an intense outstanding and very enjoyable talent." --Scotland on Sunday "Both an elegant request that the sum of Coetzee's existence as a public figure be looked for only in his writing, and ample evidence, once again, why that request should be honoured."
--Observer
From the Trade Paperback edition.
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Summertime is an inventive and inspired work of fiction that allows J.M. Coetzee to imagine his own life with a critical and unsparing eye, revealing painful moral struggles and attempts to come to grips with what it means to care for another human being. A young English biographer is researc
A young English biographer is working on a book about the late writer, John Coetzee. He plans to focus on a period in the seventies when, the biographer senses, Coetzee was 'finding his feet as a writer'.He embarks on a series of interviews with people who were important to Coetzee - a married woman
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