Like Philip Larkin in ‘Posterity’, imagining an American lecturer yawning over his research into an ‘old-type natural fouled-up guy’, J.M. Coetzee places himself in the shoes of a notional English biographer gathering the material that will make sense of the years that followed his 1972 return to South Africa. The result is Summertime, third part of Coetzee’s semi-fictionalised biographical trilogy.
Two previous volumes — Boyhood and Youth — recounted the author’s childhood in the Western Cape as the son of middle-class Afrikaners and his move to London, where he tried his hand as a computer programmer. Like Summertime, both of those books used the distancing third person, as though Coetzee simply could not bear the intimacy of a life conveyed first-hand. In this volume he goes one step further along the path of self-elimination, viewing his experience exclusively via the insights of outsiders, almost all of them women.
The distance allows Coetzee to demonstrate a cool mercilessness towards his own self few authors would stomach. The adult Coetzee, it seems, is a sorry specimen. Limp, bloodless, he elicits impatience, near disgust from those who meet him. Julia, a married neighbour who bedded him, found that ‘sex with him lacked all thrill’. ‘I presume his mother must have taken to him, when he was little, and loved him, because that is what mothers are there for,’ she meditates. ‘But it was hard to imagine anyone else doing so.’
Margot, a cousin, is kinder. Her memories of a reunion at the family farm in the bleak Karoo tells us something about the agonised bond Coetzee feels with the land of his forefathers. But even she judges him a ‘lightweight’, ‘who ran away to the big world and now comes creeping back to the little world with his tail between his legs.’
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