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Fiction

An author in search of himself

Summertime, J.M.Coetzee, Harvill Secker, p.266, price not stated.

The premise of J.M. Coetzee’s Summertime is that the South African writer John Coetzee — a Nobel laureate, author of such novels as Dusklands and Disgrace — has recently died in Australia and that a young Englishman named Vincent is attempting to write a book about him. However, Vincent’s book seems an inadequate, even whimsical undertaking: it will focus only on the mid-1970s — a time when Coetzee was living with his aged father near Cape Town — and it won’t be a comprehensive biography so much as a collection of impressions gleaned from five people who knew Coetzee to varying degrees during this period.

These people include a Brazilian dancer named Adriana who believes that Coetzee was attracted both to her and to her young daughter (whom he taught English); a married woman named Julia, with whom he had a liaison; and his cousin Margot. Summertime comprises largely of their recollections — including a narrative rendering by Vincent of what Margot tells him — and the portrait that emerges of Coetzee is an unflattering one: a dull, asexual, socially awkward, self-absorbed man. One respondent describes him as a sphere, a glass ball, because “there was no way to connect to him... he wasn’t constructed to fit into or be fitted into”. Another likens him to a block of wood that has neither rhythm nor soul. He is variously derided or pitied.

Inevitably, the discussions reveal at least as much about the interviewees themselves as they do about Coetzee. One woman insists, somewhat shrilly, that John was nothing more than a peripheral character in her grand life-story; another uncomfortably wonders why Vincent wants to know so much about her when the book should really be about John. The question of why a celebrated author’s life should be of more interest than the lives of “ordinary” people runs through Summertime, as does the question of whether one should even try to “understand” a writer outside of what his work tells us about him.

Vincent has excerpts from notebooks maintained by “John Coetzee” in the 1970s, excerpts where the author hazily reflects on the state of his country and on his own attempts to achieve immortality through his writing. “Why does he persist in inscribing marks on paper, in the faint hope that people not yet born will take the trouble to decipher them?” But Vincent doesn’t want to rely on these diaries, because “Coetzee was a fictioneer… he is making up a fiction of himself for his own eyes, or perhaps for posterity...if you want the truth you have to hear from people who knew him directly, in the flesh”.

To which one of Vincent’s interviewees pointedly asks, “But what if we are all fictioneers? Why should what I tell you about Coetzee be any worthier of credence than what he tells you himself?” Passages like this are so involving that it’s possible for the reader to forget that Summertime is written by (the real-life) J.M. Coetzee, who is very much alive, and that Vincent and his respondents are the fictional creations.

So what is Summertime, really? It’s been widely described as a “fictionalised memoir”, and at times it reads like an exercise in masochism, an unflinching self-examination that dismisses not only the man but also the writer. (“He had no special sensitivity, no original insight into the human condition,” says one of Coetzee’s colleagues, “Nowhere in his work do you get a feeling of a writer deforming his medium to say what has never been said before.”) The deceased Coetzee in this book could be a version of the real-life author, but some important details don’t match — the real Coetzee was married and had children at the time, for example.

But for all the meta-complexities of this book, it is first and foremost a novel, and a novel that has all the strengths of J.M. Coetzee’s best fiction. Despite its spare structure and conversation-driven narrative, it’s a book of ideas, full of reflections not only about the relationship between an artist’s life and his work, but also about the functions, possibilities — and limitations — of literature itself. Summertime is a meditation on how difficult — ultimately impossible — it is to satisfactorily transfer the complexities of human experience into words on a page. (“Something sounds wrong, but I can’t put my finger on it. All I can say is, your version doesn’t sound like what I told you,” one of “Coetzee’s women” tells Vincent.) And it’s both ironical and entirely appropriate that this point is being made by one of contemporary literature’s greatest, most insightful practitioners.

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