From Publishers Weekly
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 Deno?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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Review
"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
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"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.