One is a character type who crops up in Coetzee's novels, a type that has served western male writers of the last half century well, from Saul Bellow to Michel Houellebecq: the learned, sceptical man in middle years, unsure whether the lust for life and love that continues to course through him is a curse or a benison. It is ironic that a writer with an undeserved reputation for being a recluse (Coetzee doesn't like giving interviews) seems to be taking less interest in the storytelling keel of his books and is inviting us instead to listen in to an intimate conversation he is having with himself, in the form of multiple alter egos. He has moved away from naturalistic, storytelling fiction towards other forms - essays, polemic and memoir, or a composite of all three in a fictional framework. Since Disgrace, the nature of Coetzee's project has changed. Coetzee emigrated to Australia in 2002, although it is not clear whether this was because of the new South African order. The fact that the rapists are black, and that the up-and-coming black farm worker who lives close to his daughter isn't cooperative in catching them, provoked anger in the upper echelons of South Africa's post-apartheid government. Coetzee took off his skin to write the almost unbearably truthful story of a white lecturer who takes sexual advantage of a student, is disgraced and goes to his daughter in the country, where she is gang-raped. A third masterwork, Disgrace, won him the second Booker.

(Coetzee's book came out in 1980.)Ĭoetzee won the Booker with his fourth novel, Life and Times of Michael K, an eerily colour-blind account of its eponymous hero's odyssey from the city to the wilderness and back in a South Africa enduring an imaginary war. Substitute 'terrorists' for 'barbarians' and you have a history of Britain and America since 2001. The first was Waiting for the Barbarians, a parable about the use of falsely imagined enemies for social control. None was less than unusually good, but three in particular have carried his work into the realm of lasting things. How can you be a great writer if you are just an ordinary little man?'Ĭoetzee built his literary reputation on the eight novels he published between 19. He was a little man, an unimportant little man. to my mind, a talent for words is not enough if you want to be a great writer. The critics are four women, all once loved by 'John Coetzee', the Coetzee character, three of them loving him back, in different ways. Summertime is full of harsh reviews of Coetzee by Coetzee, of Coetzee the writer and Coetzee the man.

The bad meta-review of Coetzee comes out of the mouth of one of the characters in Coetzee's new book, Summertime, which is about Coetzee. It sounds hurtful, and perhaps it is, although the novelist who wrote it was JM Coetzee.

Summertime by jm coetzee summary