Summertime by J. M. Coetzee

What is this book? Autobiography? Novel? Non-fiction? A bit of all of those. Coetzee writes about himself as if he were deceased and, in this book, a would-be biographer interviews five people who knew Coetzee in the 70s, who knew him prior to his fame as a writer. As I read the book, I would go back and forth between thinking this was written by a man who needs to stop obsessing about himself, stop the endless, wearying introspection AND thinking it was a clever and original way of writing about oneself.

I didn't know much about Coetzee except that the milieu for his books is South Africa. He was apparently raised in the stern Dutch Protestant-Abrahma Kuyper tradition, but "saved" somewhat by his Mother's more enlightened ideas about educating a child. However, that material is not in this book. Instead, there is commentary about the South Africa of Afrikaners, British, Coloured and Africans on the verge of change. These imminent changes are not the story, only the background, as the narrator tries to glean significance about John Coetzee from those he interviews.

I liked the book more as I read it, and a definite, quite precise characterization of Coetzee in that time frame is the end result. (He currently lives in Adelaide, Australia.)

Here is one vignette about his cousin Margot (one of those interviewed) and her husband Lukas who have a small farm but also have second jobs, and we find out that they work so hard so as to be able to "house their workers properly and pay them a decent wage and make sure their children went to school and support those same workers later when they grew old and infirm..." This sort of simple observation tells so much; it is what good writers can do.