"Of far more interest than John Coetzee's scratchy existence are the tales told by the interviewees of their relations with him.Rest assured that the artfully voiced self-portraits of these fully realised women yield all the pleasures of more traditional fiction." - Boyd Tonkin, The Independent (.) In Coetzee's recent work, the sheer tricksiness of the narrative ruses can sound off-putting. (.) Bleak, chilly but finely calibrated, a deadpan humour anchors Summertime: the human absurdity of a lofty nobody cultivating his "principles" at the edge of an abyss. All the same, it dwells on a time and place where manipulated versions of character and identity could dictate not merely the difference between success and failure, acceptance and rejection, but even life and death. "Of course, Summertime is fiction above all - "auto-fiction", if you prefer."Assuming that Summertime is a bona fide self-portrait, it’s the least flattering since Dorian Gray’s." - John Sutherland, Financial Times.Not only does Coetzee dose himself with self-ridicule, he also permits his self-construction some naked displays of emotion." - Geordie Williamson, The Australian (.) Coetzee's death frees him from the old constraints. The author's absence is, rather, a metaphor for other absences.
But I do not think this is Coetzee's intention. The reader is absorbed by these reiterations, only to close the book with the sense of being gulled: vast gaps in our knowledge of the man remain. "Where one subject is mystified by a particular aspect of Coetzee's character, another will revisit it with affection a third will consider it absurd.Warmer, and closer to the less obscure passions of Coetzee's earlier work, it allows itself the pleasures of the novel." - Delia Falconer, The Australian
"For all its ambiguous stagings of "truths", Summertime is an oddly moving book that seems liberated by its substitution of a chorus of voices for the contained third person of Boyhood and Youth.Then there's the grief that throws it all away and in doing so throws it into high relief." - Peter Craven, The Age (.) Much of this weird book is a meditation on the absurdity of the fame that is the surface noise of a hypothetical immortality.
If we didn't know that, then the tenor of the book, the glow of puzzled expectation that we bring to it, would be different.
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