Summertime by jm coetzee5/14/2023 ![]() ![]() ![]() The quasi-documentary elements - the notebook entries, the biographer seeking to construct his particular Coetzee by scraping together first- hand reports, no matter how thin - seem to embody the essence of a remark that one character makes to Vincent. Vincent, whose interviews and reworked versions of interviews with sources who knew Coetzee form the bulk of “Summertime.” Those interviews, by turns searing and sympathetic and bearing an aura of failure, are bracketed at the beginning and close of the novel by putative entries from Coetzee’s notebooks, some bearing his own italicized comments on how to treat the material, assumedly for future publication. John Coetzee was at least “dogged” if not a great writer, maintains his would-be biographer, known only as Mr. Part of the sly fun - despite the author’s depiction of his fictional namesake as humorless, gloomy and, from eyewitness testimony, unexceptional - is in watching Coetzee apparently shadowboxing some version of his public persona. Who better to face the mirror than a Nobel laureate who has made a career of lacerating the cruelty of the apartheid state, the cruelty of humans to animals, the various shames created and endured simply by being alive? Someone with a hypertrophied conscience, even if his alter ego is described in “Summertime” as lacking passion. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |