More summer reading: Coetzee's Summertime

Just finished reading J. M. Coetzee’s Summertime and am ready to run to the library to check out more of his books. Not that this is a book that you rave “I LOVED that book” or “That was a beautiful story!” (not like My Antonia). Nor does it have a gripping plot. But it was fun to read in a word game type of way. Once into the story, I couldn’t stop trying to figure out “Who IS John Coetzee and why should I care?” which leads to the reflexive, “Who am I and why should anyone care?”



I initially picked up the book because I kept seeing his name as an award winner, but I never read closely any reviews of his work. Now I can’t decide if this lack of knowledge of his work is good for reading this novel of sorts or not. I grabbed the first thing I saw by him at the library – figured it was timely, being summer and all, but apparently it’s the third book in a trilogy of faux autobiographies. I was halfway in before I figured that out. Now I have to go read the other 2 books.


The Setting: South Africa, mostly Cape Town, but also the Karoo, semi-desert area where Coetzee spent part of his youth. (add colonial oppression’s affect on the colonizers as one of the themes.)


The Concept: Set up as a series of interviews between a biographer of Coetzee (who is dead in the fiction) and 4 women and 1 man who may have had an influence on his work, Summertime is an experiment in the questionable narrator. Here’s Coetzee, writing as an interviewer wanting to know about Coetzee, and the women (as imagined by Coetzee) sharing their idea of Coetzee. The women declare he’s unlovable and distant, unsuited to marriage, but they are able to love him in their special way. He’s unkempt and awkward, but ends up having these intimate encounters with women. Mostly married women, I should add.

The Character: So is Coetzee the rescuer of unhappily married women, even though he appears to lack passion himself? Is the interviewer making more of these encounters because he wants to portray Coetzee as a man who loves, even though the women all declare he is incapable of letting his armor down enough to truly love intimately? Is it the nature of biographers to seize on the dramatic and make more of events than they merit, or did all of these encounters affect C’s writing - and did he allow/pursue them in order to enliven his work? Is Coetzee really saying this about himself or does he simply want to play with ideas of authority and authenticity and authorship? I wonder if this were a fun book to write: to imagine what people, lovers, say about you after you’re dead, to imagine a reader taking your work seriously enough to try to figure out who you were.


The themes: The affect of an author's personality and experience on his work, authenticity of experience, education, fate, the nature of love, the relationship between son and father. A commentary on how we read books and read people.   This interviewer thinks he’ll find the key to Coetzee’s breakthrough as a writer in the people he met just prior to being recognized. The one man the interviewer talks to comments that it seems rather strange to do a biography of a writer while ignoring the writer’s work, and “Because it is not in the nature of love affairs for the lovers to see each other whole and steady.” (Does anyone see another whole, even/especially the self, let alone lovers?)

The interviewer doesn’t trust Coetzee’s notebooks and diaries to be a reliable record of his personality because C was “a fictioneer” who made himself up. But as one of C’s lovers says, the truth is “What if we all continually make up the stories of our lives?” She goes on to say, “he believed our life-stories are ours to construct as we wish, within or even against the constraints imposed by the real world.”



On the other hand, this same lover says C had an innate Calvinistic fatalism coupled with a utopian political romanticism. An odd combination. And he more than once is quoted as saying he was “destined” to be in the place he is in, over-educated and underemployed, taking care of his elderly father. On top of that, he tells one of the women he has a Platonic philosophy of learning that is all about recognizing and desiring truth, which seems so elusive in this story. So part of the fun of the book is trying to figure out the complex personality of the author’s persona. I ended up feeling a sort of pathetic affection for him, an odd man out who never fit in, who cuts himself off from what he loves and so has to live with a wrenched heart, who seems to fail to live up to what others expected of him, a man who isn’t made for love, and thus in all of his books, so claims one of his lovers, the women never love the men.

Well, I suppose now I will have to read something else Coetzee, to sort out these suggestions.