'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.' (Provided by the publisher.)
Author's note:
My thanks to Marilia Bandeira for assistance with Brazilian Portuguese, and to the estate of Samuel Beckett for permission to quote (in fact to misquote) from Waiting for Godot.
The bibliographical listing of this work has been extended in the course of a 2014/15 project to create a comprehensive bibliography of Coetzee's works. We believe the record for the novel and its relationship to the revised version in Scenes of Provincial Life is comprehensive. However, due to the enormous breadth of critical material on Coetzee's work, indexing of secondary sources is not complete.
We are grateful for the author's and Indiana University's Professor Breon Mitchell's assistance in compiling this record.
Boyhood : Scenes from Provincial Life
London
:
Secker and Warburg
,
1997
6309688
1997
single work
novel
Coetzee has been reluctant to talk about himself. Now, revisiting the South Africa of a half century ago, he writes about his childhood and his own interior life. Boyhood's young narrator grew up in a new development north of Cape Town, tormented by guilt and fear. With a father he did not respect, and a mother he both adored and resented, he led a double life - at school the brilliant and well-behaved student, at home the princely despot, always terrified of losing his mother's love. His first encounters with literature, the awakenings of sexual desire, and a growing awareness of apartheid left him with baffling questions; and only in his love of the veld ("farms are places of freedom, of life") could he find a sense of belonging. Bold and telling, this masterly evocation of a young boy's life is the book Coetzee's many admirers have been waiting for, but never could have expected (Source: Libraries Australia).
Youth : Scenes from Provincial Life
London
:
Secker and Warburg
,
2002
Z1212327
2002
single work
novel
(taught in 1 units)
"The narrator of Youth, a student in the South Africa of the 1950s, has long been plotting an escape from his native country: from the stifling love of his mother, from a father whose failures haunt him, and from what he is sure is impending revolution. Studying mathematics, reading poetry, saving money, he tries to ensure that when he arrives in the real world, wherever that may be, he will be prepared to experience life to its full intensity, and transform it into art." "Arriving at last in London, however, he finds neither poetry nor romance. Instead he succumbs to the monotony of life as a computer programmer, from which random, loveless affairs offer no relief. Devoid of inspiration, he stops writing. An awkward colonial, a constitutional outsider, he begins a dark pilgrimage in which he is continually tested and continually found wanting" (Source: Viking publisher's blurb)
Taşra Hayatindan Manzaralar : roman
Suat Ertüzün
(translator),
Istanbul
:
Can Sanat Yayinlari Ltd
,
2011
8129476
2011
selected work
novel
A Turkish omnibus edition that includes translations of Boyhood, Youth and Summertime by J. M. Coetzee.
'With the publication of The Death of Jesus (2019), following The Childhood of Jesus (2013) and The Schooldays of Jesus (2016), J. M. Coetzee's Jesus novels are a completed trilogy. Baffling to reviewers and critics, attempts have been made to situate the Jesus novels in Coetzee's previous oeuvre, and to establish continuity in the author's literary thinking and style. This essay highlights Coetzee's identification with Jesus in Summertime (2009), the last instalment in the author's autobiographical trilogy, where an author named John Coetzee is already dead. The essay reads Summertime as an elaborate ‘posthumous’ confessional design meant by Coetzee to evade the obstacles of secular confession and to enable (fictional) redemption and absolution. Coetzee's invocation of Jesus as ‘a guide’ in turn serves to code authorial death and resurrection as a final act of sacrifice and taking responsibility. Thus providing a sense of finality to Coetzee's autobiographical trilogy, the confessional design of Summertime prepares for a new phase in the author's writing, in the name of Jesus.' (Publication abstract)
'This essay addresses the role of music in J. M. Coetzee's recent prose. Taking Summertime as a central example, it argues that Coetzee finds in music a means of problematizing issues of body and mind, of history and mediation, and of gender and sexuality.' (Publication abstract)
