Six Reviews, Six Carrots for Summertime by JM Coetzee

Verdict: carrot, carrot, carrot, carrot, carrot, carrot

The press in the United Kingdom has collectively weighed in, and the conclusions that might be drawn are two: either UK reviewers constitute a bunch of literary sycophants who are afraid of crossing the "big boss" of letters lest they appear terribly stupid, or JM Coetzee's Booker-shortlisted Summertime is one of the most extraordinary works the English speaking world has seen in years.

In this post, we bookend reviews from the Guardian, The Independent, the Times Online and The Telegraph - the last of which was written by Justin Cartwright - with a glance at the novel from South Africa (Tymon Smith loved it), and a rather ingenious response from Australia, where Delia Falconer writes of her reactions to Coetzee's writing in the third person and present tense, thus mimicking the mode Coetzee invented with his "auto-fictive" triology:

Writers who won’t talk — the Pynchons and Salingers — tend to foster an atmosphere of awed admiration and intimidation. If they won’t take off their masks and speak to their readers, then they are opening themselves up to the consequences of unfettered debate and interpretation.

Some, usually towards the end of their lives, attempt to assuage their readers with a memoir or autobiography — an offering of truth that can be used as a retrospective codebook to the mysteries of their published work. Others use the idea of the memoir as a platform for testing preconceptions about truth and the division between fact and fiction, and for asking their audience to reflect on why it is they care so much about the lives behind the dust-jacket photos.

• Complete review by Tymon Smith in the Sunday Times

At some point during the past couple of years, an eminent South African writer now living in Australia wrote this dismissive appraisal of John Maxwell Coetzee's œuvre: "In general, I would say that his work lacks ambition. The control of the elements is too tight. Nowhere do you get a feeling of a writer deforming his medium in order to say what has never been said before, which is to me the mark of great writing. Too cool, too neat, I would say. Too easy. Too lacking in passion."

Even when a writer has achieved international fame and won the biggest trophies - the Nobel and two Booker prizes, in Coetzee's case - a bad review can't be easy to stomach. Harder if it is not just your book that is criticised, but the premise on which you have built your life: namely, that you can, must and should write. Worse still, if the reviewer impugns your character along with your novels.

• Complete review by James Meek in the Guardian

Last year I heard the author of this book lecture about a documentary version of a writer's career that held the power to define, or even wreck, a life. With his customary precision, South Africa's Nobel Laureate – and double Booker Prize-winner - scrutinised some declassified reports to the censors of the apartheid regime during the 1970s and 1980s. They assessed the subversive potential of novels by a highbrow author and academic based in Cape Town. His name was JM Coetzee. The secret informers – Coetzee's university friends – often managed to persuade the agents of the apartheid state that this out-of-touch aesthete posed no threat to public order. Peter McDonald's eye-opening book, The Literature Police, tells the complete story.

Summertime extends a chain of fictionalised memoirs that began with Coetzee's Boyhood (subtitled, as here, "scenes from provincial life") and continued in Youth. Yet it also returns to the ironic, self-mocking – and always deniable - dramatisation of a parallel life that he recently undertook in Diary of a Bad Year. This book is presented as the research materials for a life of the late Nobel Laureate "John Coetzee", gathered by an English biographer. It does seem to stick close to some activities of our flesh-and-blood writer after he returned from the US to Cape Town in the early 1970s. Even the jacket photo, of Coetzee at that period, appears to match the lank-haired introspective drifter – "an alleenloper, as some male animals are: a loner" – that we meet through the unimpressed testimonies of lovers, relatives and colleagues that "Mr Vincent" collects.

• Complete review by Boyd Tonkin in The Independent

Imagine for a moment that John Coetzee is dead. He has left behind a series of notebook entries in preparation for writing the final volume of his memoirs. What kinds of challenges would face a biographer setting out to write a life of this South African-born Nobel Laureate, whose public persona as “J. M. Coetzee”, at least as constructed by the literary press, is characterized by extreme privacy, if not awkwardness? (This is, after all, an author who did not attend either of the ceremonies at which his novels were given the Booker Prize.) Who would such a biographer interview, and what kinds of questions would he ask? More particularly, who might presume to speak about the personal life of an author who has attempted so radically to subvert the idea of literary celebrity in an age that celebrates the confessional?

This is the conceit behind Coetzee’s new book, Summertime, presented as the final volume of his Scenes from Provincial Life trilogy of fictionalized memoirs, which began with Boyhood (1997) and Youth (2002). The first books both employ a distancing third-person narrator, recounting events in the life of the character John, or “he”. Boyhood is concerned with young John’s life in Worcester and Cape Town in the late 1940s and early 50s, depicting the author as a Europhile child culturally out of place in his homeland. Youth takes John from Cape Town to London in the early 1960s; here he works for IBM, has painful affairs, and, coping with the bleak realities of mid-century England, tries to be a poet. Both books function as explorations into the life of the writer at crucial stages in his aesthetic and intellectual development.

• Complete review by Patrick Denman Flanery at the Times Online

The question to be asked about this book – is it a novel? – was also asked about an earlier book, Youth, when that was first marketed as fiction. Although Youth had a third-person narration, it was not in any identifiable sense a novel.

Personally, I don’t care; if J M Coetzee had written Summertime in iambic tetrameter that would have been fine by me. But I wonder if the publishers didn’t calculate that a double Booker winner and Nobel Prize laureate would generate more sales with what purports to be a novel than with a very tricksy memoir.

And this is a very tricksy memoir. A researcher is investigating the life of John Coetzee, recently dead in Australia. He has some of Coetzee’s notebooks at his disposal; he has also tracked down some of his lovers of the period. But the researcher is interested only in the years 1972-1975 – which is not very plausible unless this is indeed volume three of the memoirs – when Coetzee has returned to Cape Town from the United States and is living with his elderly father while trying to make a career as a teacher and writer.

• Complete review by Justin Cartwright in The Telegraph

It is the third in a trilogy of books relating the life, from childhood to his 30s, of a writer named "John Coetzee". Boyhood (1997) and Youth (2002), are written in a free indirect third person that appears to offer an observation window into the unfolding consciousness of their subject. The new volume, Summertime, consists of scraps of the author's notebooks and transcripts of interviews compiled by Mr Vincent, an English biographer who is investigating the author's return from London and America to the South Africa of the 1970s. His "Coetzee" resembles the Nobel prize-winning writer in many aspects, except he has died before the book begins.

How is she meant to read this trilogy of "memoirs"? Summertime has, after all, just been long-listed for the Booker prize for fiction (the author has won the award twice, for Life and Times of Michael K in 1983 and Disgrace in 1999).

The slip between these registers is troubling. On the one hand, the trilogy seems to promise her insights into the formative experiences and obsessions of this notoriously elusive author. Reading Boyhood, for example, she notes that his antipathy towards his Afrikaner heritage and over-attuned sense of shame appear precociously present, almost inborn. (Like his mother, he identifies as "English"; he not only associates his Afrikaner schoolmates with casual brutality and an animal disregard for privacy, but also suggests there is a pathology ingrained in the circumlocutions of Afrikaans.) Youth describes the writer arriving in 60s London, filled with romantic expectations that the city will provide grist for his art; instead, the artistic life he embarks on proves solitary and ingrown.

• Complete review by Delia Falconer in The Australian

More links

• Find further reviews of Summertime by JM Coetzee at Complete-Review.com
• Complete coverage of Summertime on BOOK SA

Book Details

• Summertime by JM Coetzee
  EAN: 9781846553189
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Photo courtesy the New York Times