Summertime - J.M. Coetzee

An autobiography like no other

pp.266

Published: Harvill Secker, 2009

A Nobel Prize laureate, J.M. Coetzee is a fascinating creature. Known as a mysterious, reclusive man, a decade-long colleague has seen him laugh just once, and acquaintances have been to dinner parties where Coetzee hasn’t opened his mouth to speak all eveniBoyhood, Youth and Summertime.  

ng. He is monk-like in his behaviourisms, the South African writer Rian Malan stating that ‘he does not drink, smoke, eat or sleep’, and writes every morning without fail. What an inner life this man must lead, and how fascinating would it be to glimpse how he relates to the world and to the people in it. A good job, then, that we have a trilogy of memoirs from the author –

Summertime is number three in the trilogy of fictionalised memoirs. It follows the writer through the years 1971-77, ‘a period when he was still finding his feet as a writer.’ It is a novel constructed under the postmodernist guise of a biography of Coetzee after his death, as though he hadn’t lived long enough to write this third instalment of his own memoirs. We are presented with a series of five interviews, each interviewee being a person who had some impact on Coetzee’s life, however seemingly small, parenthesized at the beginning and the end by fragments purportedly from the notebooks of the man himself. By treating himself as a character Coetzee gains a certain cold distance from the subject, and as such it seems to increase the reliability of the text. He has freed himself from the constraints of subjectivity, of passion, and created a novel as self-deprecatingly honest as it is experimental.  

The pervasive image that is drawn of Coetzee is of an awkward, distant, bookish man whose shyness is often misunderstood. He is, according to the last of the so-called ‘interviewees’, a writer whose work is ‘too neat, too easy … Too lacking in passion.’ As a lover he is deficient also, his sex inadequate and his emotions almost non-existent, at least as far as they are displayed outwardly. In other words, Coetzee is scathingly negative about himself, and yet the pathetic and degrading image we are presented of him seems in no way comic or deliberately, hyperbolically absurd. We get the impression of true earnestness on the part of the author. He is pictured as an uncaring son, a cerebral man thoroughly uninterested in much of the life around him. There is no sensationalism, no bragging in this depiction of the man. It is a clear, honest, sober portrait.

His dislocation from family, friends and his homeland are linked inextricably with the racial tensions of the time in South Africa. The manual labour he busies himself with at the beginning of the book causes him to be viewed strangely by locals, for manual labour was considered the work of the ‘lower’ race, the blacks, the farmhands.  And when Coetzee and his cousin are out walking, they keep well clear of ‘the cluster of cabins that house the farmworkers’. There is a distinct, insidious sense of segregation and hatred seething under the surface of the novel, as is the case with much of Coetzee’s oeuvre, while on a personal level much the same thing is taking place. The women in his life seem all to contain some hatred of the man. The novel is rife with vendettas, big and small.

This is an autobiography like no other. It is a postmodernist manipulation of the form that seeps authenticity and candidness as it simultaneously plays with its own artifice. Coetzee portrays himself as no other would dare. He puts himself completely at the mercy of an outer reality – for the ‘interviewees’ can have no clue what was going on in the man’s head – and as such Coetzee forgoes the opportunity to defend himself. This man is a brave artist. This book is worth a read.