In all three books, Coetzee is haunted by whether he is too cold and distant for normal human relations, particularly with women.

Summertime begins and ends with fragments of Coetzee’s diary, as though these were the limits to which Coetzee was willing to go to satisfy his readers’ curiosity about his personal life. They include a married woman named Julia Smith with whom he had a brief affair his cousin Margot (earlier seen in Boyhood), now happily married, whom he visited along with the rest of his family at their ancestral farm and a Brazilian dancer, Adriana Nascimento, on whom he had an unrequited crush and whose daughter Coetzee taught English. Vincent, a young English biographer, is interviewing five people who knew the now-deceased Coetzee. These were years of relative obscurity, when he had written Dusklands and In the Heart of the Country and was leading up to Waiting for the Barbarians while teaching at the University of Cape Town.īoyhood and Youth are written in objective third-person, but Summertime is more formally experimental, reminding us often of Coetzee’s Diary of a Bad Year. Summertime deals with the years from 1972 to 1977, when Coetzee had returned to South Africa (after having practiced linguistics in America and having been thrown out of the country for protesting the Vietnam War) to live in the Tokai suburb of Cape Town while taking care of his ailing father. His great fear is to have to return to South Africa as a failure. In the early ’60s, Coetzee goes against the libertine atmosphere by pursuing a writerly life of extreme restraint and discipline. Youth takes us to Coetzee’s years in England as a failing poet, literary scholar and IBM computer programmer. His father is a dissolute and disbarred attorney, from whom Coetzee gets his reticence, which can be mistaken for cruelty. He enjoys being mistaken for a Catholic in a puritan Christian school in his native Worcester. When he visits the ancestral farm in the rugged Karoo terrain, an unfamiliar expansiveness opens up in him. In Boyhood - one has to look as far back as the great 19th century classics of childhood or James Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man for apt comparisons to this monumental effort - Coetzee identifies his conflicted feelings toward his Afrikaner heritage. Little written recently competes with the depth and artistry of these three fictionalized memoirs (or memoiristic fictions) in illuminating the stages of this Nobel Prize-winning and twice Booker Prize-winning author’s maturity.

Together, Boyhood: Scenes From Provincial Life, Youth: Scenes From Provincial Life II and now Summertime constitute one of our time’s greatest testaments to the full development of a writer’s consciousness.

Summertime by jm coetzee