![]() ![]() Each successive vignette delves deeper into the tender, hopelessly self-involved persona of the author. Stifled by conflicting moral impulses, our hero is only able to muster a convincing show of passion on the night that his lover has decided to leave him once and for all. When a married woman stops to say hello, more out of pity than attraction, it sets in motion the first of many disastrous encounters. He toils absurdly, laying a new cement wall to surround the old one rotted out from the damp. At one level we follow a young South African man returned to live with his ailing father after a stint in America that ended in some unspecified disgrace. The story proceeds at two levels, each progressing steadily and each guided by its own logic. ![]() Instead, we play rapt audience to lovers, family and colleagues whose recollections painstakingly depict the fictional Coetzee as a calamitous failure of a human being, unable to make contact through the walls of his genius. Coetzee, practically every page calls out for the real Coetzee to break the fourth wall of narration and intervene on his hapless hero's behalf. As the novel develops through a disjointed series of interviews with characters from the early career of the now famous writer J.M. Coetzee's Summertime is the author's monastic restraint. Though it may strike an odd note of praise, the most admirable quality of J.M. A fictional autobiography from the Nobel Prize winning author of Disgrace ![]()
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