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Book review: Summertime
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February 4, 2010
By Peter Sullivan
Summertime
By JM Coetzee
It is hard for me to understand why others enjoy Coetzee. This is not to say he is not great - I think his writing is wonderful.
In this, well, book - for it is neither novel nor autobiography but some new genre he invented - he writes about Calvinia. My grandfather was born in that small Karoo dorp, as was his before him. So the writing speaks personally to me, to my ancestry; I feel I know Calvinia quite well.
But why do others feel the intimacy?
Coetzee talks of the disgust at apartheid felt all his white life, especially in the 1970s. I felt the same, and in those days it was a lonely feeling. Let's face it, most whites were at best ambivalent. At worst they loved it. Just look at the voting record. So why does this intimate, intense, lonely yet righteous feeling that Coetzee describes so well appeal to people in Britain, who could not have experienced it?
He talks of his love for the 19th century Russian authors. Me too! Tolstoy, Dostoevsky - loved them! But not everybody has this rather peculiar penchant for the Russians.
Twice a Booker winner, and a Nobel in 2003. Clearly his writing is loved and appreciated worldwide. But it appeals more to me, to me, dammit!
Like me, Coetzee was a child of the 1960s. That decade of assassinations: the Kennedys, Verwoerd, Martin Luther King. The Berlin Wall went up, the Beatles sang, Mandela was imprisoned.
This review is starting to sound like it is all about me. Yet the book is all about him, it is a biography, even an autobiography of sorts, truly twisted and complex, yet surprisingly easy to read.
Complex to describe, for it is about him, written by him, yet we learn more about the people he knew.
It is framed in a most peculiar manner, making it seem strange, perverse even, sufficiently different to make potential purchasers and readers wonder whether they should bother. Let me state clearly (as I am in danger of being obtuse): it is worth the bother, it is easy to read, it is a superb book.
It tells of his years of "growing up" from 1971 to 1977, but it does so in not just the third person, but a fourth and fifth person. An interviewer is interviewing the people he knew, and as they talk (mostly about themselves and their own feelings, troubles, events) so we learn what they thought about him - most of it very unflattering indeed.
And as this review starts almost to tell readers more about me than about the book, so the "interviews" tell more about the interviewees than about him, yet we get to know him, JM Coetzee, better.
In the timeline of the book he has already achieved fame, which is why his friends are being interviewed, but he has also already died, allowing them to be honest.
The interviewer is fictional, the characters are not, and he is certainly no fiction, nor is his fame, yet his death is. Strange, huh?
Don't let my tortured description put you off. His writing is simple, easy, delightfully complex only in the emotions it evokes.
It is a short book, and follows his other two autobiographical books Youth and Boyhood, both interesting recollections of an intellectual growing up in rural South Africa. It would be better to read both of those before this one, in chronological order. Different from his famous novels Waiting for the Barbarians and Life & Times of Michael K, the biographies' honesty is searing: Coetzee is not a social chap.
Astonishingly introspective. They touch us deeply, as does a lost soul. Simple, direct writing. Truly shocking honesty.
Yet I can't shrug off the feeling that they are special to me because we share a South African-ness, a dislike of racism, a love of the country's vlaktes but an anger at its white people of the 1970s and 1980s, a disgust at bureaucracy, a passion for writing and for the English language.
And yet we are so different. He is a genius, Nobel Prize, double Booker, yet almost a social misfit, uncomfortable with joy, or any kind of success, awkward with most women and many men.
See how well I think I know him, yet I have never met the man, just read his best books.
His portrait of the artist is special, almost excruciatingly intimate, as his personality reeks of unhappiness. Indeed, in Youth he writes (in the third person as always, talking of his girlfriend returning from therapy and suggesting that he go, too): "In fact he would not dream of going into therapy. The goal of therapy is to make one happy. What is the point of that? Happy people are not interesting. Better to accept the burden of unhappiness and try to turn it into something worthwhile, poetry or music or painting: that is what he believes."
So I am nothing like Coetzee; I am a firm believer in happiness. Perhaps too shallow to have his deep angst about everything. Yes, nothing like him. Yet his words resonate. I'm just like him. We share so much. Oh, what a complexity, and rendered to such simple reading. Truly a master, and Summertime a masterpiece.
And so this review becomes more about me than about him. Rather like the book, which starts with his "Notebooks" from 1972 to 1975 - but which he warns us at the end not to trust as they were meant to incorrectly depict him as something he may not be. Then there are "interviews" with Julia, Margot, Adriana, Martin and Sophie, girlfriends and colleagues, with some "undated fragments" from his notebook to end it. Only 266 small pages, widely spaced, almost too short for a good read.
None of it contains even smatterings of happiness. He struggles with relationships, struggles to contain his irritation from teaching English at school to teaching literature at university.
Yet I cannot wait for the next bit of his biography, that bit when he actually becomes amazingly successful, to discover whether he enjoys it all or not.
Summertime by JM Coetzee is published by Random House Struik at R295. More reviews and book news in Tonight.
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