Verdict: carrot
In Summertime, the third of his fictionalised memoirs, following Boyhood and Youth, J. M. Coetzee is dead. Though of course he is very much alive, cerebrally active and exercising his formidable inventiveness in the writing of this work, the format of which enables him to say a number of disparaging things about himself, at a given period in his life, in the words of interviewees.
A young biographer, the fictive Mr Vincent, has chosen to do his research on the late J. M. Coetzee through interviewing five people who knew the subject during the period on which he intends to focus, namely 1972 to 1977. Coetzee returned to South Africa from the United States in 1972 and 1977 marks his first public recognition as a writer. Therefore the period is significant in the emergence of the man, as writer. Vincent has chosen the interview option as he considers Coetzee’s diaries, notebooks and letters to be unreliable, since Coetzee is essentially a “fictioneer”. Nevertheless, some fragments, apparently from Coetzee’s notebooks, are included at the beginning and end of Summertime.
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