Okay, well……..Since I had never read Coetzee, I decided to give him a try. So, I picked up Summertime from the literary fiction room since it was staring me right in the face each day I came to work. What can I say? I was curious! And I very much liked the fact that Coetzee won the Nobel Prize for literature. Then, I went to the foreign fiction shelf and pulled his acceptance speech given in Stockholm in December of 2003 and speed read the first few pages. Surprisingly, Coetzee spends the first few pages referring to Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, an unlikely, but interesting pick, I thought. I digress……
So, back to Summertime, a challenging novel to describe. First of all, the modus operandi exudes cleverness. The narrator, an English biographer, chooses four women and one man to interview about their relationships with and opinions of the writer Coetzee during the 1970s in South Africa. The women, one a close cousin who spent much time with Coetzee as a child; another, a woman who erroneously suspected him of creating a romantic involvement with her teenage daughter; another, a lover and the fourth a married woman with whom he also had a relationship; and the fifth person interviewed, a male professor who taught with Coetzee at the University of Cape Town, rounds out the unlikely selection.
The biographer, who has already written a basic account of the time each of the interviewees spent with Coetzee, before the reader witnesses the “actual” interview, seems relentless at times in trying to get to the essence of Coetzee, the man himself. Commonalities emerge concerning the basic perceptions that the four women have on the young writer Coetzee. All seem to agree on one basic premise: the young writer is aloof and avoids close heart felt relationships, even though he seems to yearn for them. The reader eventually surmises that part of the problem must lie in the fact that Coetzee’s aging widowed, sick father, probably now in his 70s, is seemingly destitute and lives with his writer son in what is basically a shack with only the merest of modern amenities. One of the most intriguing elements of this complex novel resides in the basic questions that the biograher chooses to ask the four women and one man. He is relentless and angers the interviewees often for his misconceptions and assumptions, not only about Coetzee, but also about themselves. They often remind him that he never met the man Coetzee in person!
I had to keep reminding myself that I was not strictly reading an autobiography, nor a biography, but a work of fiction, created by an award winning international writer who created a narrator/biographer to record the writer’s life in the 1970s. On top of that, Coetzee chose the interviewees, the questions which they would be asked, and even their answers. For that matter, I asked myself, did he fictionalize the people themselves? What if these people, or their exact versions, never existed, but are simply compilations of people he wished he had known or with whom he dreamed that he had relationships? After all, isn’t it a writer’s prerogative to rewrite “the truth”? Maybe he did not fictionalize, however, but did the best he could objectively recording his life. I did not feel like I was being manipulated as a reader at all as I was reading this enigmatic novel. It doesn’t really matter, does it, whether Coetzee was being totally truthful? I am enamoured of Coetzee, the writer, and will look forward to reading more or his work. Did I mention that this novel was a finalist for the Man Booker for 2009?
Coetzee Photo Credit: The Guardian, September 6, 2008
-Nan
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