Writing about writing about writing

Summertime

By JM Coetzee

Publisher: Harvill Secker
Pages: 266
Price: Rs 1100

'Summertime' is the latest work of South African novelist and literary critic John Maxwell Coetzee, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2003. It is the third of a series of memoirs following 'Boyhood' and 'Youth', and focuses on Coetzee's life in the years 1972-1977 when he returned to South Africa after receiving his PhD from the US -- and was finding his feet as a writer.

Reading Summertime is more like meditation than entertainment. Coetzee's writing is always intensely personal. He writes with a heightened self-awareness about what he knows and his fiction is usually autobiographical. In the case of this particular book, his autobiography is fictionalised and he confesses to having made up dialogues and incidents to better illustrate what really matters -- the emotions and the impressions left behind.

Coetzee 'fictioneers' his book by writing in the words of a young biographer (Vincent) researching a book he plans to write on the late, Nobel Prize winning writer JM Coetzee. His research is made up of interviews from people referred to in JM Coetzee's notes and the notes themselves. The list of interviewees -- a couple of former mistresses, a cousin, a colleague and a love interest who spurned him -- is rather narrowed down by the fact that along with the author, most of the people close to him are also deceased. What they can offer about the subject is limited. They all seem confused about why anyone would want to write about JM Coetzee who, it turns out, was an unremarkable man with no special sensitivity, "no original insight into the human condition" that one would expect from a famous writer.

The author goes off on many tangents on the lives and stories of the interviewees which serve to highlight the context and how a man exists as a chapter, a paragraph or a sentence in the lives of so many people he interacts with over a lifetime. The asymmetry of the relationships is also interesting -- someone the great writer idolised and even based a character of his book on merely thought him a brief distraction from a distressed marriage. Another with whom he had a much longer relationship was surprised and hurt that she did not feature at all in any of his books.

Coming from the deeply fractured society that is South Africa, Coetzee's writing always features an oppressive cloud of colonialism and apartheid. He isn't political though and this oppressive cloud is always in the backdrop. He feels he was "reluctant to invest too deeply in the country, since sooner or later our ties to it would have to be cut…" He blames the macho Afrikaner culture for stunting him emotionally. This comes out especially strongly in his description of his relationship with his father.

For all the criticism of Afrikaner culture, Coetzee strongly identifies with it. To quote his friend, "he felt there was no way in which he could separate himself off from the Afrikaners while retaining his self-respect, even if that meant being associated with all that the Afrikaners were responsible for, politically."

Through killing himself in the book and his tongue-in-cheek presentation of himself as a writer, Coetzee has taken the chance to review his own body of work that won him the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2003 and give his own pronouncement on his writing career. He describes his former mistress describing him as "asexual" and "barely a man" while suggesting the early loss of his mother as the reason. This is his impression of himself and his writing style -- detached and does not evoke strong emotions. His prose is simple and elegant and a welcome relief from the flowery, overindulgent metaphors and similes that have begun to proliferate in writing nowadays.

Coetzee's concluding opinion on his writings (or his fictionalised opinion) is: "In general I would say that his work lacks ambition… Nowhere do you get the feeling of a writer deforming his medium in order to say what has never been said before, which is to me the mark of great writing. Too cool, too neat, too easy. Too lacking in passion."

He believes he lacks the courage to commit himself wholly to his writing and holds back a little. This is also possibly the reason he spends his life as a teacher, seeking refuge in academia even though he believes he was an unexceptional teacher with not much of a following amongst his students.

The book being what it is -- a biography of a writer and a commentary of his writing -- one needs to be familiar with his work to really get the most out of it. Those looking to sample him for the first time would be better off saving 'Summertime' for later and starting from the beginning with his two Booker Prize winning books 'The Life and Times of Michael K' and 'Disgrace'.

http://jang.com.pk/thenews/may2010-weekly/nos-23-05-2010/lit.htm#1