Summertime by J.M. Coetzee

I don't understand exactly what J.M.Coetzee was trying to accomplish with this book, but I can say that he did it very well.

This is perhaps an autobiography of the writer just as he was beginning to be published, written in the form of a novel. Then, again, maybe it is an entirely fictional account, just using his own name for the central character to give it the flavor of authenticity. Maybe he is mounting an oblique campaign against the cult of personality which often surrounds an honored author and implying that the life of the writer is unimportant; only the writings are important. Maybe he is anticipating the criticisms of future biographers by detailing and perhaps exaggerating his personal inadequacies. Maybe it is a combination of some of the above, or something else entirely.

As for the "plot" itself, the novel is structured as the transcriptions of interviews by a biographer of the deceased John Coetzee with some of the people who knew him during the time in question. We hear from a restless wife who had an affair with him, from his cousin who was also his childhood first love, from the mother of one of his students, from a male teaching colleague, and from a female colleague with whom he also had an affair. We also have purported notes from a journal kept by John Coetzee at the time.

All of this portrays John Coetzee is a most unflattering light. He is viewed by those interviewed as being inadequate in personal interactions, cold, somewhat arrogant, distant, an awkward and disconnected lover, almost asexual, and a bad son. One has to wonder if this is how J.M.Coetzee judges himself or if he perceives that this is how others must judge him. Or what?

The wonder is that all of this could be even remotely interesting to a reader, but it is. Even without a linear plot or a resolution, it is compulsively readable. That is, in itself, a grand accomplishment.

This "novel" was shortlisted for England's Booker Prize. J.M. Coetzee has also won the Nobel Prize.