{"id":150,"date":"2010-01-03T18:32:51","date_gmt":"2010-01-03T23:32:51","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/johnstrawn.com\/?p=150"},"modified":"2010-01-03T18:32:51","modified_gmt":"2010-01-03T23:32:51","slug":"review-of-summertime-by-j-m-coetzee","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/theaposition.com\/johnstrawn\/reviews\/150\/review-of-summertime-by-j-m-coetzee","title":{"rendered":"Review of Summertime, by J. M. Coetzee"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 The narrator of J.M. Coetzee\u2019s new novel, \u201cSummertime,\u201d<\/a> identified only as a \u201cMr Vincent,\u201d is an English academic gathering information for a biographical study of a key period in the life of \u201cJohn Coetzee,\u201d the \u201clate\u201d South African writer.<\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0 \u00a0The novel\u2019s opening is framed by \u201cfragments\u201d from \u201cJohn Coetzee\u2019s notebooks for the years 1972-75,\u201d a narrative device J.M. Coetzee borrows from Joseph Conrad, followed by chapters consisting of annotated transcriptions of interviews with his subjects, all of whom knew this fictive Coetzee to varying degrees. Like his acknowledged literary forebear, Samuel Beckett, and like Conrad, this John Coetzee writes in a non-natal language, albeit one he learned as a child.<\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0 \u00a0Beckett and Coetzee repudiate the idea that literature teaches or uplifts \u2014 it simply is what it is, thoughtful or not, and incapable of engagement on \u201cissues.\u201d It\u2019s up to the reader to provide meaning. Conrad, too, wrote powerful fiction that readers would invest with contradictory interpretations. In \u201cHeart of Darkness,\u201d Conrad\u2019s narrator introduces readers to what he is about to recount as one of Marlowe\u2019s \u201cinconclusive tales,\u201d and \u201cSummertime,\u201d a story that luxuriates in doubt, echoes Conrad\u2019s indirection.<\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0 \u00a0The interviews start with Julia, a woman we come to understand is a therapist living in Canada. But at the time she knew Coetzee more than 30 years before she was his neighbor, and lover, in suburban Cape Town. John Coetzee was living with his father, a quiet, lonely man, in a cottage around which a new housing estate has been constructed. Despite his advanced degrees, John Coetzee drives a pickup and is remodeling the cottage, including knocking up concrete and pouring a slab \u2014 work inspired, he told Julia, by \u201cthe need to overthrow the taboo on manual labor.\u201d He is also a tutor in English to secondary-school pupils. Julia is the daughter of Jewish refugees from Hungary, and in middle age a person of formidable certainties.<\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0 \u00a0She says of John Coetzee, \u201cHe was the only man I knew who would let me beat him in an honest argument. … It wasn\u2019t that he couldn\u2019t argue; but he ran his life according to principles, whereas I was a pragmatist. Pragmatism always beats principles; that is just the way things are.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0 \u00a0Cousin Margot, another key informant for Vincent, has been interviewed through an interpreter; her native tongue is Afrikaans. She describes her cousin John\u2019s Afrikaans as \u201chalting,\u201d and \u201cblames the deterioration\u201d on his move to Cape Town and then abroad. Vincent has transcribed the tapes of their conversation, he tells Margot, and had \u201ca colleague from South Africa … check that I had the Afrikaans words right. Then I … fixed up the prose to read as an uninterrupted narrative spoken in your voice.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0 \u00a0So, we have the actual novelist J.M. Coetzee writing as if the storyteller is a woman whose translated words are being \u201cfixed up\u201d by an English academic who in turn is reading the story to its original teller, in English no less, but purporting to be her words. At one point Margot interjects, \u201cNow I must protest. I said nothing remotely like that. You are putting words in my mouth.\u201d The narrator replies, \u201cI\u2019m sorry, I must have gotten carried away.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0 \u00a0Margot\u2019s chapter fills in elements of Coetzee family history and recounts John\u2019s nostalgia for the dry Karoo, where his family farmed a property so large a person could not walk across it in a day. Yet he had forsaken this land, avoiding military service by studying abroad. \u201cNot without reason, the Coetzees took it to mean he had disowned his country, his family, his very parents.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0 \u00a0There are elements of the story being excavated by Vincent that we know correspond to the biographical details of J.M. Coetzee\u2019s life. John Coetzee lives the modest life he does because he suffered some \u201cdisgrace\u201d in America \u2014 none of Vincent\u2019s sources know any details. His father, too, lives in enigmatic disgrace, a disbarred lawyer working as a bookkeeper for a pair of Jewish brothers from eastern Europe whose other clerk is a Muslim woman. \u201cThe brothers, it must be presumed … are aware of his chequered past in the legal profession.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0 \u00a0J.M. Coetzee was arrested during anti-Vietnam war demonstrations in the early 1970s, when he was a young professor in New York. He returned to South Africa, where his lawyer father had been disbarred some years before for anti-apartheid activities. Nothing in \u201cJohn\u201d Coetzee\u2019s biography suggests this political possibility \u2014 the details of the shared disgraces of father and son are left unexplained, as if a principled political stance with consequences somehow constituted a form of failure.<\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0 \u00a0One of Vincent\u2019s witnesses uses the word \u201cscatterlings\u201d in reference to the Portuguese-speaking schoolgirls from Angola who are among John Coetzee\u2019s pupils. (Their mother, a Brazilian who has not read Coetzee\u2019s novel \u201cFoe,\u201d but when told by Vincent that its heroine in the first draft was a Brasiliera asks him to send her a copy so she can \u201csee what this man of wood made of me.\u201d)<\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0 \u00a0Scatterling is, as far as I can tell, a neologism of the South African musician Johnny Clegg, referring to people pushed about the continent by the historical forces of settlement and de-colonization. J.M. Coetzee, who now lives in Australia, is himself a scatterling, and has made the scatterlings\u2019 world the center of his fictional universe. \u201cSummertime,\u201d with its dark tone softened by surprising dabs of humor, is a rich addition to Coetzee\u2019s formidable oeuvre.<\/p>\n

http:\/\/www.oregonlive.com\/books\/index.ssf\/2010\/01\/fiction_summertime.html<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 The narrator of J.M. Coetzee\u2019s new novel, \u201cSummertime,\u201d identified only as a \u201cMr Vincent,\u201d is an English academic gathering… Read more »<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[33],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-150","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-reviews"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/theaposition.com\/johnstrawn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/150","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/theaposition.com\/johnstrawn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/theaposition.com\/johnstrawn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theaposition.com\/johnstrawn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theaposition.com\/johnstrawn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=150"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/theaposition.com\/johnstrawn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/150\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":152,"href":"https:\/\/theaposition.com\/johnstrawn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/150\/revisions\/152"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/theaposition.com\/johnstrawn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=150"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theaposition.com\/johnstrawn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=150"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theaposition.com\/johnstrawn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=150"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}