Verdict: stick
It’s not that Heyns doesn’t like Summertime, it’s that it nags him in ways that prevent him from embracing it the way he embraced Boyhood and Youth:
For some time now, JM Coetzee’s most absorbing fictional relationship has been with himself, not only in the two fictionalised biographies preceding this one, Boyhood (1997) and Youth (2002), but also in the ostensibly more distanced fiction. The writer Elizabeth Costello, for instance, in the novel by that name (2003), and also in her guest appearance in Slow Man (2005), is clearly some kind of alter ego for Coetzee, as is JC, the ex-South African novelist living in Australia in Diary of a Bad Year (2007).
Summertime, blurbed as the last of “the majestic trilogy of fictionalised memoir”, is squarely in the autobiographical vein of Coetzee’s writing, except that here the autobiography is disguised as biography: “John Coetzee” has died, and a would-be biographer is gathering material for his record of John’s life in “the years from Coetzee’s return to South Africa in 1971/72 until his first public recognition in 1977″.
The book in our hands, then, is a collection of interviews with five people who knew its subject in these years, sandwiched between two extracts from John’s notebooks.
The book is an exercise in point of view: Coetzee is having fun with the various filters that come into play when he, the novelist, writes an account of somebody else’s account of him. What purports to be, say, Julia’s recollections of John, is Coetzee’s attempt to see the young John through Julia’s eyes.
Book Details
Please register or log in to comment
