Summertime
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
And he was just a boy, this Mr Coetzee. I was a woman and he was a boy. He was a boy as a priest is always a boy until suddenly one day he is an old man.
After some time in America, the young unpublished writer John Coetzee returns to suburban Cape Town to live with his ailing father. His biographer chronicles this period in a series of interviews with the people important in Coetzee’s life, constructing a portrait of an awkward literary man at a remove from those around him. Summertime is the last of J. M. Coetzee’s masterly trio of autobiographical novels, Scenes from Provincial Life.
J. M. Coetzee was the first author to win the Booker Prize twice and was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2003. He lives in Adelaide.
‘Not since Disgrace has he written with such urgency and feeling.’ New Yorker
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Nobel laureate and two-time Booker-winner Coetzee has been shortlisted for the third time for this powerful novel, a semisequel to the fictionalized memoirs Boyhood and Youth that takes the form of a young biographer's interviews with colleagues of the late author John Coetzee. To Dr. Julia Frankl, who briefly sought in Coetzee deliverance from her husband, he was "not fully human"; to his cousin, Margot Jonker, he is boring, ridiculous and misguided; and to Sophie Deno l, an expert in African literature, Coetzee is an underwhelming writer with "no original insight into the human condition." The harshest characterization and also the best of the interviews comes from Adriana Nascimento, a Brazilian emigrant who met Coetzee when both were teachers in Cape Town; she was repulsed by the intellectual's attempts at courtship. "He is nothing," she says, "was nothing... an embarrassment." The biographer's efforts to describe his subject ultimately result in an examination that reaches through fiction and memoir to grasp what the traditional record leaves out.
