Summertime and J.M. Coetzee on Beauty and Consolation
New J.M. Coetzee work, Summertime (due out September 3rd). This from BookSA:
About Summertime
A young English biographer is working on a book about the late writer, John Coetzee. He plans to focus on the years from 1972-1977 when Coetzee, in his thirties, is sharing a run-down cottage in the suburbs of Cape Town with his widowed father. This, the biographer senses, is the period when he was ‘finding his feet as a writer’.
Never having met Coetzee, he embarks on a series of interviews with people who were important to him – a married woman with whom he had an affair, his favourite cousin Margot, a Brazilian dancer whose daughter had English lessons with him, former friends and colleagues.
From their testimony emerges a portrait of the young Coetzee as an awkward, bookish individual with little talent for opening himself to others. Within the family he is regarded as an outsider, someone who tried to flee the tribe and has now returned, chastened. His insistence on doing manual work, his long hair and beard, rumours that he writes poetry evoke nothing but suspicion in the South Africa of the time.
Sometimes heartbreaking, often very funny, Summertime shows us a great writer as he limbers up for his task. It completes the majestic trilogy of fictionalised memoir begun with Boyhood and Youth.
Also, watch this beautiful hour-long dutch interview/film with J.M. Coetzee musing (in English) on beauty and consolation, writing and death.
Notes to follow here tomorrow.
May 26th, 2009 at 3:50 PM
“Fictionalised memoir”: I don’t believe I’ve ever thought to use that phrase. I think I’d like to read this trilogy. This is such a curious setting that I really think I’ll be missing something special by not reading it…