Summertime is the final instalment of ‘Scenes from Provincial Life’, South African-Australian Nobel laureate Coetzee’s superb trilogy of autobiographical novels. Having addressed his Cape Town childhood in Boyhood, and self-imposed exile in London in Youth, Coetzee now focusses on the period 1972-1977, during which time he has published his first novel but is still struggling with his sense of self as a writer. Back in South Africa after years abroad, he shares a rundown cottage in Cape Town with his widowed father, scraping by as a part-time English teacher. Sometimes grimly humorous, mostly just grim, Summertime is masterfully written, unfolding via a series of (fictional) interviews--conducted by a biographer of the ‘late’ John Coetzee--with significant figures in the author’s life. It is as much an exploration of the problematic relationship between fiction and biography as it is a memoir. Indeed, problematic relationships are the meat of Summertime: Coetzee’s inability to connect with his father, with women, with human beings in general; his alienation from his own country; and finally his difficulties with writing itself. This is a gratifying conclusion to Coetzee’s trilogy and can be highly recommended as a cerebral but compulsively readable experiment in autobiography.

This review from Australian Bookseller & Publisher magazine (March 2009, Vol 88, No 6.) is reproduced by kind permission of Thorpe-Bowker, a division of R R Bowker LLC. © Copyright 2009, Thorpe-Bowker.

Tags: j.m. coetzee