Verdict: carrot
While some are tired of Coetzee’s narrative games, Rosenthal applauds Summertime for being “thought-provoking and clever”:
From Boyhood and Youth to Summertime seems a strange way to conjugate successive titles, but it does adroitly avoid any mention of manhood or adulthood. And it does have an echo of an old favourite song that goes on to say, “… and the living is easy”, which indeed it was for an educated young white male in those days. Easy enough. And, not only is this third volume of JM Coetzee’s fictionalised autobiography going as a novel, (short-listed for the Man Booker prize, again), it has also been preceded by some rather autobiographical novels going as novels. Coetzee no longer adheres to the old forms and mixes previously separated genres, including essays and interviews, as it suits him.
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Image courtesy The New York Times
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