From http://shawjonathan.wordpress.com/

This is autobiographical writing, covering the years when Coetzee was teaching at school and university in Cape Town and writing his first novels. It's not straightforward autobiography, though. The John Coetzee character is dead, so who knows in what other respects the narrative here differs from the factual record? The book consists mainly of transcripts of recorded conversations between an (almost certainly invented) academic biographer and a handful of people. I have no idea what relationship any of the interviewees have to actual people, but I am persuaded that there's a genuine project here on Coetzee's part of imagining how he was perceived by a number of key people in his life at that time. 'Coetzee' doesn't exactly emerge covered in glory; in fact, if this had been told in straightforward narrative, even in third person, some of it would have been cringingly embarrassing, and some of it, removed from the realm of hints and suspicions, might have laid the author open to criminal investigation. Coming mainly from women who had or in one case (if she is to be believed) didn't have sexual liaisons with him, it's funny, and for me at least very engaging. Coetzee has performed a remarkable feat of writing a version of himself as perceived by people he'd had unsatisfactory intimate relationships with, to whom he was more or less peripheral. It's an act of great imagination and unsparing self scrutiny. ( )

Coetzee adds a third fictionalized memoir to his repertoire - this one about his thirties between 1972 and 1975. His previous two works were Boyhood and Youth.

It is always said that a memoir or autobiographical account is a subjective and inaccurate interpretation of how the author sees his world. In this account, his biographer, Mr. Vincent. is researching the dead writer, John Coetzee. He interviews acquaintances of Coetzee and puts together fragments of information.

Coetzee creates an impressionistic view of himself, based on other’s accounts. He distances himself from his character and creates a multi-layered blurring of fact and fiction. Cleverly allusive, this technique allows for supposition and contradiction, and a pessimistic picture of a sexually autistic, social misfit emerges. Coetzee is unkempt, unattractive and emotionally disconnected, still living with his father. The reader is left with the negative image of a man successful at perhaps only one thing, the ability to write.

'Summertime' is another wonderful piece of writing from a supremely talented author. He has taken a genre, and reworked it into an allusive, impressionistic and intriguing portrayal of a weak-hearted, emotionally thwarted, unhappy man - a man with a major inferiority complex. I have to ask the question, upon finishing; is Coetzee really autistic, or just supremely negative about his social, interpersonal and sexual skills? ( )

The real deal with this book ; - a single man's dignity, whilst in and out of relationships, and in the South Africa of that time.

I found this book interesting in that what the protagonists say about the subject of the book - a white south african writer - , says as much about themselves as it does about the writer himself. Relationships, then, seem to come into focus ; and it's predominantly the male/female relationships.

He is portrayed as madman fool, by a brazilan, who seems bullish in that portrayal.
Or as a useful pass time, by an unhappily married woman.

In that way the writer has a kind of revenge on the voices within the book. Of course it is not all about that; - he is not portrayed as anything special himself; - especially as a writer.

The stark choice at the end of the book, shows an emotional depth, which was lacking elsewhere and is perhaps the chance for reprieve from one the most potent accusations against the writer's character, running throughout the various narratives; - an emotional distance , that even dogs can sniff out. ( )

At first glance, J. M. Coetzee’s Summertime looks like an autobiography. It appears to be an account of Coetzee’s life from 1972, just after he moves from America to his childhood home of South Africa, to 1977, shortly after his first book is published. But it’s couched in a strange conceit. Instead of straightforward narration, Coetzee chooses to have a fictional biographer tell his story, and Summertime itself is not the biography but the interview transcripts and journal excerpts that the fictional biographer intends to use. And so what we have is not an autobiography at all but a reflection on the difficulty of writing a life story.

This was my first Coetzee, and I think that worked to my advantage because I was able to easily put aside questions of fact and fiction. As far as I was concerned, the John Coetzee of the novel is a fictional invention.

The unnamed biographer relies on a small number of journal entries and interviews with a handful of people who knew John in the 1970s. Together, these sources depict John as a socially awkward man who is difficult to get to know. Their observations give a vague sense of the man, but it’s never quite clear whether their accounts can be entirely trusted, not because they are being deliberately obtuse, but because they cannot know his story.

One might imagine that John’s journals would be a better source, but the journals themselves reveal their lack of reliability because they include his own notes about what needs to be elaborated on. There’s also good reason to believe that the finished biography, by a potentially unbiased outside observer will be lacking.

Although the idea of the slippery nature of biographical or autobiographical writing strikes me as the dominant theme of Summertime, Coetzee leaves some room for consideration of familial attachments, the nature of love and passion, and the writer’s temperament. It’s all masterfully done, and I was very impressed. See my complete review at my blog. ( )

This is my first Coetzee book. I saw the movie adaptation of his book Disgrace recently which I found fascinating. It really made me think. And I guess this book does the same thing. I didn't want to read it at first because it is the third in a trilogy and I thought I might not do it credit not having read the other two first. So please, take all my observations with this in mind. Having avoided reading it for quite a while - the library reminder notice got me motivated - I was pleasantly surprised to find it quite an easy read. And it is a slim volume at 266 pages. It's a bit disconcerting because the author sets it in the future - after his death - as if it were the notebooks of a biographer. There are some extracts from notebooks and a series of interviews with significant people in the author's life. Well the ones that are still alive that is.

The line between fact and fiction therefore is at once challenged. I confess to not knowing much about Coetzee's life so it probably would be a bit of fun and a detective chase to determine what bits might be real and what bits might be fiction. But in the end is that important? The reader is constantly questioning why the author is going down this path? Is he really revealing stuff about himself? In which case it's not necessarily very complimentary. But then if it was complimentary, wouldn't we as readers think less of the author because he was not quite humble enough?

As an amateur family historian this really is a fascinating read. What do we leave behind for others to determine about who we really were when we lived? Our work colleagues will have one view of us. Our lovers will have another view. Our relations will have another view again. And ultimately what do we choose to reveal of ourselves? In our diaries or jottings? An important passage, I think, from the book is when the biographer and Sophie Denoel talk about sources and their veracity. First the biographer says: "What Coetzee writes there cannot be trusted, not as a factual record - not because he was a liar but because he was a fictioneer. In his letters he is making up a fiction of himself for his correspondents; in his diaries he is doing much the same for his own eyes, or perhaps for posterity....." Sophie responds: "But what if we are all fictioneers, as you call Coetzee? What if we all continually make up the stories of our lives? Why should what I tell you about Coetzee be any worthier of credence than what he tells you himself?"

Interesting stuff indeed! ( )