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Finding truth in fiction

 

Sally Bland, The Jordan Times

 

Summertime: Scenes from Provincial Life
 
J. M. Coetzee
 
London: Vintage, 2010
 
Pp. 266
 
J. M. Coetzee, famed South African — now Australian — writer, who won the 2003 Nobel Prize for literature, has published three fictionalised memoirs, sometimes termed autobiographical novels. Following “Boyhood” (1997) and “Youth” (2002), this is the third. In “Summertime”, he chooses a most unusual approach. Presupposing himself dead, he has a hypothetical researcher interview five people who knew him in the 1970s, when he was newly returned from the US, having attained a graduate degree and taught at universities there. This is the period just prior to the publication of his first novel, “Dusklands” (1977), which set him on the path to international recognition.
 
The first page of the book blazes with an account of extrajudicial killings perpetrated by the South African regime in neighbouring Botswana, disguised as black-on-black violence. Such accounts are prevalent in much of Coetzee’s writing, showing his distain for the apartheid regime and its senseless violence: “So they come out, week after week, these tales from the borderlands, murders followed by bland denials. He reads the reports and feels soiled…” (p 4)
 
The above quote is from notebooks dated 1972-75, presumably in preparation for a book Coetzee intended to write before he “died” and now used as a reference by his would-be biographer. They set the scene: Coetzee is living with his father in their deteriorating old home in the white suburbs of Cape Town, close to the notorious Pollsmoor prison where Nelson Mandela and other political prisoners were once incarcerated. Coetzee has begun the Sisyphus-like task of repairing the house, based on his belief that people should do their own manual labour. He even asks himself why he persists in “inscribing marks on paper, in the faint hope that people not yet born will take the trouble to decipher them”. (p. 7)
 
This self-questioning is typical for the self-effacing image of himself that Coetzee projects via the interviews. The first is with Julia, a psychiatrist who had an affair with him and dismisses him as a loner, socially inept and repressed, though she seems most interested in talking about herself. The next interview is with his cousin Margot, written up as a narrative about a Christmas holiday gathering at the expansive, remote family farm. Again, the author appears as an outsider, this time in relation to the Coetzee clan: “John’s presence on the farm is a source of unease. After years spent overseas… he has suddenly reappeared among them under some cloud or other, some disgrace. One story being whispered about is that he has been in an American jail”. (p. 89)
 
Strangely, no one asks John about this, so they continue to think it was some kind of criminality, rather than the protest against the Vietnam War in which he was involved. This section reveals the narrow, provinciality of the Afrikaners rural community, even those who live a more sophisticated life. It also shows that the old order is unravelling: White farmers can no longer make a living from the land; race relations are changing. Coetzee’s love of the land and nostalgia are also revealed as he shares childhood memories with Margot “of those Christmastides of yore… when they were children roaming the veld as free as wild animals”. (p. 108)
 
Questions of identity come to the fore in a different way in the third interview, with Adriana, a Brazilian ballet dancer who has landed in South Africa with her two daughters and been widowed, due to a combination of circumstances. Since John is dead, he cannot defend himself from her accusations that as an Afrikaner he is not qualified to teach her daughters English, and that he had sexual designs on her and her daughter. She dismisses him as a nothing, despite knowing he later became a famous writer.
 
The fourth and fifth interviews paint a different picture, though confirming Coetzee’s outsider status. His former colleagues at the University of Cape Town, South African Martin and Sophie, a French woman, share his abhorrence of apartheid and affirm his seriousness as an intellectual and teacher. Sophie in particular offers insight into John’s utopian thinking, his abhorrence of politics and his principled opposition to injustice, violence and other forms of cruelty, while holding out the tantalising tidbit that she had a “liaison” with him, but refusing to go into details.
 
There is much the reader does not know. Are the interviewees based on real people? Is the writing of this fictionalised memoir an act of soul searching on Coetzee’s part, or is he sometimes playing, poking fun at himself and others? Or both. But it doesn’t really matter. The book is fascinating as it swings back and forth between serious moral considerations and wry humour. Coetzee paints a complex, nuanced picture of South Africa at the time, rich in insight and irony. The composite picture of the author that emerges from the interviews is of a conflicted man of great integrity who eschews superficiality and pretence. He writes from the periphery of the white experience, not presuming to speak for the African majority. One aspect that surely reflects truth is his agonising over how to care for his ailing father, with whom he shares little, but to whom feels a sense of duty—a truly universal predicament. “Summertime” is available at the University Bookshop.
 
 

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