After a delay of several months following its publication in England, J. M. Coetzee's Summertime has been published in the United States. (Penguin, $25.95)
Characterized as a "Fiction" rather than a Novel or a Memoir, it is in the nature of a sequel to the author's earlier works Boyhood and Youth and focuses on the life of one John Coetzee in the 1970's. This fictional Coetzee has died and an English biographer, who never met his subject, is trying to gather information on those years from some people who knew him then; most of the book consists of interviews with those people, in which they describe their relationship (often fleeting) with this rather diffident, self-centered, retiring oddball, who was just in those years publishing his first novel.
There are also fragments from Coetzee's diaries or journals, which he also apparently wrote in the third person (i.e., "he did.." this or that). The interviewees are lovers, relatives and colleagues although it is clear that no one knew him very well, probably by his choice. Hovering over the entire book is the issue of the Afrikaners in South Africa and in particular how Coetzee--who of course became one of the great writers in English--emerged from that background and in certain ways always remained part of it
I have no way of knowing how much of Summertime is fictional but would guess that Coetzee in this unusual format has presented a very unsparing and honest portrait of himself, along with extremely fluent and engaging portraits of the others in his life at that time (both the interviewees and other members of his family, especially his father). A remarkable read.
— Jeremy Nussbaum
