BookwormBy John Andrews
Now that I am back at my desk, bursting with ideas for good read recommendations, I thought that a somewhat challenging book might be in order this month.
J.M. Coetzee’s work includes Waiting for the Barbarians, Life and Times of Michael K, Boyhood: Scenes from Provincial Life, Youth, Disgrace and Diary of a Bad Year.
He was the first author to win the Booker Prize twice, and he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2003.
I have just finished Coetzee’s latest novel, Summertime, published this year by Vintage in paperback, and I found it as good a read as his earlier works. In many ways, the novel is written in diary form and is clearly intended as a part biography of the great man himself.
A young English biographer is working on a book about the late writer Coetzee and he focuses on the seventies when he was clearly producing human, witty and truthful novels set in apartheid South Africa. He embarks on a series of interviews with people who were important to Coetzee - a lonely married woman with whom he has a most unusual affair, his favourite cousin Margot, a Brazilian dancer whose daughter had English lessons with him, former friends and colleagues.
What we see is a disturbing portrait of a hugely talented man, awkward, bookish and generally regarded as an outsider within the family.
His insistence on doing manual work as a well-educated white man in pre-Mandela South Africa, his long hair and unkempt beard and rumours that he writes poetry evoke nothing but suspicion in the apartheid world that existed in the mid-seventies. (Mandela was still on Robben Island in 1975.)
This is a meditation and an intriguing map of a constricted heart struggling within South Africa’s claustrophobic, un-poetic, overtly macho society.
It is not necessary to know anything of Coetzee’s earlier works to enjoy this novel for what it provides: rich pickings as an imaginatively distorting portrait of the writer as an outsider. The Irish Times called the book wonderful stuff. But then Coetzee is wonderful: edgy, full of black humour, remorselessly human, witty and often outright funny. I hope readers will be as absorbed in his narrative as I was and will enjoy this offbeat, elusive and truthful novel.