Short description
A title that completes the trilogy of fictionalised memoir begun with Boyhood and Youth .
Long description
A young English biographer is working on a book about the late writer, John Coetzee. He plans to focus on the years from 1972-1977 when Coetzee, in his thirties, is sharing a run-down cottage in the suburbs of Cape Town with his widowed father. This, the biographer senses, is the period when he was 'finding his feet as a writer'. Never having met Coetzee, he embarks on a series of interviews with people who were important to him - a married woman with whom he had an affair, his favourite cousin Margot, a Brazilian dancer whose daughter had English lessons with him, former friends and colleagues. From their testimony emerges a portrait of the young Coetzee as an awkward, bookish individual with little talent for opening himself to others. Within the family he is regarded as an outsider, someone who tried to flee the tribe and has now returned, chastened. His insistence on doing manual work, his long hair and beard, rumours that he writes poetry evoke nothing but suspicion in the South Africa of the time. Sometimes heartbreaking, often very funny, Summertime shows us a great writer as he limbers up for his task. It completes the majestic trilogy of fictionalised memoir begun with Boyhood and Youth .
Review
This is the third instalment of a life so reserved, so repressed, so seething with polite rage and restrained despair that it could only be approached through a third-person voice... it is wonderful stuff. But then, Coetzee is wonderful: edgy, black, remorselessly human, witty, and often outright funny... Summertime is offbeat and deliberate, elusive and truthful.
-- Irish Times
The cumulative effect of Coetzee's unblinking honesty and his never-wavering seriousness, is an understanding of the creation of a great writer.
-- Sunday Telegraph
Beautifully reflective... reveal a strangely sincere, self-critical and romantic man... an intense outstanding and very enjoyable talent. --Scotland on Sunday Both an elegant request that the sum of Coetzee's existence as a public figure be looked for only in his writing, and ample evidence, once again, why that request should be honoured.
-- Observer
From the Trade Paperback edition.