In Summertime, author J.M. Coetzee has addressed his biography in a postmodern, meta-fictional way by writing a fake life story that is the opposite of glorification, but that also hides the real Coetzee in an ingenious fashion. The setup of the book is that writer "John Coetzee" has died, after which a fictitious biographer, named Vincent, has interviews with five different persons to compile materials on his life. Vincent concentrates on the years 1971-77, after Coetzee returned from the United States to South Africa, as this supposedly was an important formative period in the late author’s life. Some fragments from Coetzee's “posthumously” opened notebooks are also given. Presumably, the book we have consists of rough drafts by this Vincent to be worked out later.
Four of the persons interviewed are women: two former lovers (Julia, a woman living in the same neighborhood in Capetown, with whom "John Coetzee" had a brief affair that led to the dissolution of her marriage; Sophie, a former French teacher and colleague at Capetown University), a married cousin, Margot, to whom John Coetzee felt close when they were both children — this time, after their car breaks down, they have to spend an uncomfortable and cold night in the desert together; and a suspicious Brazilian woman whose daughter was taught English by John Coetzee and who accuses John Coetzee of making overtures to both her and her teenage daughter, although he never existed for her “as a man.”
In fact, besides these small affairs, not much happens to John Coetzee in those years. He has returned to South Africa from a sojourn in the United States and lives with his elderly, ailing father in suburban Cape Town. Both men are isolated from each other. John has various part time teaching jobs while unsuccessfully trying to find a more permanent position at the university. He feels a sentimental attachment to the dry desert-like landscape of Karoo, where the family’s ancestral farm still stands. He publishes his first book, Dusklands.
A quick look at J.M. Coetzee’s biography soon learns, how fake this “auto/biography” is: in the said period, J.M. Coetzee already was employed at the University of Capetown, and far from living singly with his father, he lived with his own family, a wife and two teenage kids! This fictionalization has made critics aware that the two earlier volumes of J.M. Coetzee’s “autobiography,” Boyhood and Youth, can also not be taken at face value, although in Summertime the fictional elements are more deliberate.
What’s more, in Summertime J.M. Coetzee gives a very ironic and unflattering portrait of himself. Where an American would have taken the opportunity to embellish his life, to blow it up to gigantic proportions, J.M. Coetzee with his Dutch ancestry is not only modest but outright self-deprecatory. John Coetzee was too inhibited to show any enthusiasm and therefore was a bad teacher. He had a cold Calvinistic personality and didn’t like to reveal anything about himself. He felt no love for his father but only shame. He was unable to build a meaningful relationship with women — his former partners even call his lovemaking “autistic” (there is indeed a funny scene where he wants to make love to the rhythm of Schubert’s String Quintet, which of course completely puts off his partner). Although already in his thirties, he still behaved like a boy. And, finally, as a writer he had no special sensitivity or original insight in the human condition. He was just a man of his time, gifted, but not a giant. His work therefore lacks ambition and the control of the elements is too tight…
Why would J.M. Coetzee do this? Why would he blast himself as son, as teacher, as lover, and — most of all — as writer? Perhaps we can find the answer in Coetzee’s extreme reclusiveness, which is in a way comparable to that of Henry James. J.M. Coetzee doesn't see why readers should be at all interested in his private life. Isn't it, in fact, immoral to be interested in the life of one Coetzee, just because he is a famous writer? Without mentioning them, this novel is the great "anti" to our popular press with its paparazzi, reality TV shows where lives are publicly dissected and our tendency to seek everywhere for human interest and emotion (not to mention Facebook).
It is also post-modernism over the top. J.M. Coetzee imagines a fictional biographer, who has interviews with fictional persons, who give fictional information about a fictional writer John Coetzee — five layers of fiction! Far from being a bona fide auto/biography, this is an anti-auto/biography, bending the facts of Coetzee's life because he doesn’t want us to pry in it. Coetzee did the same sort of thing when, after he became famous and was often asked to give lectures, instead of divulging details about his life, he read fictional stories — even at the Nobel Prize lecture! A writer, after all, is a fictionalizer.
A remark about J.M. Coetzee’s self-deprecatory attitude: I believe in this way Coetzee also wants to make clear that writers are not in any way special people, or in a wider sense, that in our ordinary time there live only very ordinary people — those who seem like giants (sports heroes, film and rock stars, popular politicians) only do so because their lives have been blown up out of proportion by unreliable media. Special people simply don’t exist, at least not anymore today. It is good to be ordinary (although it helps to be a bit gifted), and, in a world that is already mad enough, it is also good to be cool and in control like Coetzee.
And a final word about Summertime: when the above discussion gives the impression that this is a dark or tough book, I have good news, for Summertime is the funniest and brightest book that Coetzee has written — with its merciless and humorous dissection of John Coetzee’s character and love life by four women, it is really a book full of summer sunshine and a good start for new readers of this author.
The writer: J.M. (John Maxwell) Coetzee. born in 1940 in South Africa, is one of the most celebrated English-language authors of our time. Coetzee was born to Afrikaner parents (descended from early Dutch immigrants to South Africa in the 17th c.) who spoke English at home. He studied English literature and mathematics at the University of Cape Town and in the first half of the 1960s worked as computer programmer in the U.K. In 1965 he went to the University of Texas in Austin where he obtained his Ph.D. Subsequently, he taught English literature at the University of New York in Buffalo. Coetzee wanted to obtain American citizenship, but was ordered to leave the country after he was arrested for his involvement in anti-Vietnam-War protests. He then returned to South Africa to teach English literature at the University of Cape Town. Starting with Dusklands in 1974, Coetzee so far has written 16 novels, but he has also published short stories, literary essays, letters and translations. In 2003 Coetzee became recipient of the Nobel Prize in Literature; he also twice won the Man Booker Prize, for Life & Times of Michael K in 1983 and for Disgrace in 1999 (Summertime was also nominated in 2009). Coetzee relocated to Australia in 2002 and lives in Adelaide; in 2006, he became an Australian citizen. For more work by this author, see Elizabeth Costello in “Animals” and Disgrace in “State of the World.”