Product Description

Shortlisted for the 2009 Man Booker Prize

A brilliant new work of fiction from the Nobel Prize-winning author of Disgrace and Diary of a Bad Year

A young English biographer is researching a book about the late South African writer John Coetzee, focusing on Coetzee in his thirties, at a time when he was living in a rundown cottage in the Cape Town suburbs with his widowed father-a time, the biographer is convinced, when Coetzee was finding himself as a writer. Never having met the man himself, the biographer interviews five people who knew Coetzee well, including a married woman with whom he had an affair, his cousin Margot, and a Brazilian dancer whose daughter took English lessons with him. These accounts add up to an image of an awkward, reserved, and bookish young man who finds it hard to make meaningful connections with the people around him.

Summertime is an inventive and inspired work of fiction that allows J.M. Coetzee to imagine his own life with a critical and unsparing eye, revealing painful moral struggles and attempts to come to grips with what it means to care for another human being. Incisive, elegant, and often surprisingly funny, Summertime is a compelling work by one of today's most esteemed writers.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #2802 in Books
• Published on: 2009-12-24
• Released on: 2009-12-24
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 256 pages

About the Author
J.M. Coetzee's work includes Waiting for the Barbarians, Life & Times of Michael K, Foe, and Slow Man, among others. He has been awarded many prizes, including the Booker Prize (twice). In 2003, he received the Nobel Prize for Literature.

Customer Reviews

The Best of The Trilogy
This was a strong contender for the 2009 Man Booker Prize. Many felt it didn't have a chance because Coetzee had already won two Bookers. I certainly preferred Summertime to the Man Booker winner, Wolf Hall.

This is the third in a series that began with Boyhood and continued with Youth. The first two books were fictional biographies of writer John Coetzee and were told in the third person but with insight into Coetzee's thoughts. It is very difficult to assess what is fiction and what is true biography though I simply didn't worry about it and just enjoyed the novels. They're both excellent books but Summertime is even better and is structured very interestingly.

In this novel, he chooses a different approach in that he tells of dead writer John Coetzee through a journalist's interviews with old friends and acquaintances of Coetzee (mostly women.)

The perspective is interesting and his writing about his dead self from the perspective of others was fascinating. It is set in the 70s when Coetzee lives with his aging father in Cape Town. This is around the time just before he first started to publish novels.

Those that tell the story include his cousin Margot whom he planned on marrying when he was a child,a woman whom he became infatuated with but would have none of him and a former lover.

A consistent theme throughout the book is that Coetzee may have turned out to be a great writer but he certainly didn't strike anyone as a person destined for greatness. Through the eyes of others, Coetzee portrays himself as cold, distant, arrogant and somewhat strange. One of the characters does make a comment that Coetzee may not have appeared that he would be a great writer but he didn't win the Nobel Prize for nothing.

The portrayal of his life in 1970s South Africa is very creative, moves well and gives great insight into JM Coetzee I loved how he wrote about himself but by doing it through the words of others said things that are not quite the same as when one does it directly.

I thoroughly enjoyed it, highly recommend it and wished he had won a third Booker for it